


Rancor Vitalis

by orphan_account



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Zombie Apocalypse, Ben Solo Needs A Hug, Ben is in his late 40's, Breeding, Canon-Typical Violence, Consensual Underage Sex, Cordyceps Fungus (The Last of Us), Creampie, Dark, Dark Reylo, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Dry Humping, F/M, Implied/Referenced Incest, Implied/Referenced Rape/Non-con, Mental Health Issues, Miscarriage, Older Man/Younger Woman, Past Sexual Abuse, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Rape Recovery, Rey is 16, Self-Harm, The Last of Us (au), Torture, Unsafe Sex
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-29
Updated: 2020-11-02
Packaged: 2021-03-06 17:42:19
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Underage
Chapters: 10
Words: 29,049
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26182870
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: Distinguished FEDRA soldier Ben Solo hates the Fireflies with his whole being. They've taken everything from him: His mother, his father, his uncle, and too many of his friends. The grudge has only worsened as the years have passed, as more and more bloodshed is perpetrated on both sides.Too bad they're his only hope now. Them, and a 16 year old who doesn't know when to shut the fuck up.
Relationships: Rey/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren
Comments: 64
Kudos: 122





	1. Chapter 1

Rain, again. It’s been raining for three straight days. Ben might’ve been okay with that, of course, if the lone window in his bare-bones dorm wasn’t cracked and leaking and the roof wasn't pockmarked with holes. He eyes the window, watching as little teardrops trickle their way in and roll down the glass, only to land on a wooden sill with an unsatisfying plink. Dark eyes fall to the blue face of his alarm clock, garish in the relative dark of the room. It reads 4:45 AM, exactly the time it had been set to since he first joined the ranks of FEDRA. 

Hux is still asleep.

As silently as Ben can muster, he throws his legs over the side of his bottom bunk and allows his feet to touch the carpet, nose wrinkling when met with the sick squelch of wet fiber. Ben pulls his legs up instinctively, and curls his arms around his knees just for a moment, wiping his heels on the sheets before tentatively leaning out to look for the newest leak. 

“Hux,” He mutters, slapping his hand on the wooden frame of their bunk in a series of loud thunks. “Get your ass up.”

The redhead grumbles, and Ben can hear the shift of sheets as Hux rolls over and pulls a pillow over his curly red locks. “Five more minutes.”

“We ain’t got five minutes.”

A groan in reply. Ben huffs and finally allows his feet to touch the floor again, carefully avoiding the wet spot this time. He skirts a few meticulously placed cups and buckets, over to a dresser he shared with not only Hux, but the two other residents of their quarters who slept in their own bunks just across the room. 

One of them was new. He found himself looking at her for a moment, bleary-eyed and wondering where she came from until it finally dawned that she’d been drafted just last night. Ben had been half asleep when she was first ushered in, but he caught the name Phasma, and noted that she must have been religious-- because she wore a hijab, and got up to pray in the small hours of the morning

He reluctantly draws his attention away from the suddenly filled bed, and drags open the second drawer from the top of the dresser, finding his worn, clean fatigues. Ben pulls on the dark tee first, layering over it the navy button-up with the embroidered pin marking him as **_SOLO._**

With a yawn, he sheds the thick flannel pants he’d worn to bed, and pulls on a pair of grey cargos, ripped at the knees and stitched together again. The material is rough, but he likes that about them. They feel professional, even if they were a bit too starched for the liking of most of his Cadets. 

Ben meanders back over to the bunk he shares with Hux. He reaches up to give the other man a harsh slap to the back, and a hiss. “I ain’t missing chow time because you wanna have a few more winks.”

That seems to do the trick, because Hux finally rolls his head to stare at Ben via cracked eyelids, his tired expression unbelievably sour. His lips part as though he means to say something… and then he has time to absorb the irritation in his counterpart’s face. Thinking better of it, Hux merely jets out a grunt and sits up. 

Ben settles back down on his bed, leaning over to pull a pair of fresh socks over his feet. They’d be okay with keeping the water off, maybe even prevent a few of the customary boot blisters he developed every few weeks or so, but they weren’t exactly designer made. He doesn’t have much time to admire the dandy new pair before shoving them into dark workboots, and lacing them up as tight as he can manage in their rubbery prisons. 

It takes a few more minutes of goading Hux on before the two men are plodding their way down the outer balcony, silent in their rainslickers and matching uniforms. 

The campus of Casper College is quiet, save for the morning crew beginning to wake and start their rounds. Ben noted several members of his squad emerging from various doors in the dormitories, falling into step with both Hux and Ben as they made their way toward the haphazardly thrown-together tent at the center of the large lot. 

Mud slops over the black toes of Ben’s boots, and clings as he walks. He’s forced to do an awkward individual leg-lift until they reach pavement again, giving him the gait of a drunkenly marching soldier. 

The Dining Tent, more affectionately known as a chow hall, is a large canopy with clear plastic flaps guarding from the elements, hiding a few rows of graffiti-scarred picnic tables and a single inlet with serving women in hairnets. 

Ben claimed his breakfast of watery oatmeal, a packet of peanuts that looked like they were past rancid, a small carton of raisins, and a water bottle-- all of which he brought back to his table on a dented metal tray. 

“Y’know what your problem is?” Hux asks, yawning over powdered scrambled eggs and a square of dry toast.

“What?”

“You don’t know when to take care of yourself.”

Ben scoffs, and shovels a spoonful of soggy oats, cinnamon flavored, into his mouth. A few small morsels drip onto the beginning patches of uneven facial hair, and he wipes them away on his sleeve. “I take care’a myself just fine.”

“You hardly sleep.”

“I dare you to find a single person that sleeps well these days,” the dark-headed man mutters, peeling open his package of raisins and popping a few into his mouth to offset the bland oats. “Maybe you just sleep _too_ much.”

Hux cocks his shoulders, and forks up a generous helping of egg. “I’m just saying, it wouldn’t kill you to take the job a little less seriously.”

That earns Hux a look. But the redhead lifts his hands in mock surrender, spitting out-- “Hear me out, man. Just _listen_ for a minute.”

Outside the tent, the storm rumbles restlessly, and a crack of blinding white turns the early morning gloom into a bright grey, before dying back to dark as quickly as it had happened. Ben looks aged in the sudden flash, his eyes hung with purple bags, two lines etched deeply at the corners of his nostrils. The tired, empty shell of a man known as Ben Solo just grunts, and gestures with his spoon for Hux to continue. 

“Look, you’re my best friend. I’ve known you for a long, long time,” Hux starts, “But this job is killing you. Have you looked in a mirror lately? You don’t look like you eat or sleep. It’s like this is the only thing you live for anymore.”

“I have a purpose if I’m serving. I don’t got nothin’ else.”

~~_I have to kill fireflies. It's what I was meant to do._ ~~

Ben wearily tries to imagine his life if he might suddenly retire from the FEDRA subdivision known as _The First Order_ , if he just hung up his vest and his pin and left it all behind. The very thought leaves a sour taste in his mouth-- he can imagine the feeling he’d get once he was free and just a civilian again. The emptiness would return. The uselessness. FEDRA gave his life meaning. Without that… what was he?

It had taken the world ending and twenty three years of human suffering for Ben to realize that structure was needed to separate sane and insane. There were plenty of civilians in the Casper QZ that were fine and dandy with being useless and drunk, but not Ben. He needed something to keep him busy-- and what better way to keep busy than to fight the terrorist cell known as the Fireflies?

Hux is talking again, but Ben can’t be bothered to listen. His eyes roam over the plastic walls of the tent, eyeballing a section papered in wanted posters. One of them in particular catches his eye… a girl, much younger than him in the face, with blossom lips and round eyes under a strangely intricate braided hairstyle. WANTED : REY NIIMA, FOR FIREFLY AFFILIATION.

Ben stifles the urge to scoff as he tears open his package of peanuts, and eagerly empties the whole thing into his mouth, before drowning them with a heavy gulp of water. 

**_“Solo. Hux.”_ **

His attention is reigned back to reality at the voice. It belongs to a tall, bald man, his face mangled badly with burns around two startlingly cruel eyes. Sergeant Snoke grunts an informal greeting to them as he sits down. Only a mug of instant coffee is in front of him, dwarfed by one of his massive hands settled palm down on the table. 

“We’re doing perimeter today,” Snoke says, not even looking up from the coffee as he’s flanked by another two of their squad members. “You got your masks?”

_“Yes, sir.”_ The two men say in unison. 

“Good. Make sure to pick up the rest of your gear, and then meet me out at the 19th street gate. Let’s get this shit done and get out of the goddamn rain, alright?”

_“Yes, sir.”_ They say again.

“Alright. Finish your breakfast and let’s move out.”

The number one enemy of a FEDRA unit in Casper is not, in fact, the infected. Trench foot seems to kill just as easily as CBI, and more painfully. Ben knew too many good people who lost a leg to it, and some of those had even died of sepsis due to the advanced gangrene, and so Ben had taken great care over the years to keep his feet warm and dry when on the job.

The water sloshing around in his boots does nothing to foster good faith, however.

In the wet times of autumn and winter, the health officials tended to push DAC-- Dried, Aired, Cleaned. He repeats it in his mind like an obsessive mantra, making notes to kick off his boots and dry his socks as soon as he’s off duty. 

Rain taps against his clear plastic slicker, an incessant click that grinds against Ben’s nerves. He cradles his AR-15 against his body, attempting in vain to keep it out of the elements while he follows the snaketrail of Snoke’s muddy footprints. 

The Subdivision Squad known as **_THE FIRST ORDER_** was made up of six people, all led under Sergeant Snoke, a guy known in FEDRA for being the most bloodthirsty old codger the world had ever seen. There was Ben Solo and Hux, of course, and then Phasma, a pretty African American girl called Sloane, along with her twin brother Yale. And finally, an older man named Enric Pryde, who, like Ben, had gone against the new militia standard and chosen to introduce himself as both names instead of just one. 

Ben’s eyes catch the concrete outside of the wall, and skate briefly over the tacky remains of old wanted posters. The girl from the dining tent is here too, plastered in several places, her face runny and smeared by rain. He stares at the posters, wondering idly if he knew her. She sure looked familiar.

A scrambling sound shakes him out of his stupor. Ben gently pokes Snoke in the shoulder with his gun, and when the old man looks back, he gestures to the foliage on the hostile side of the wall. Quietly, “Heard somethin’.”

Snoke pauses, his icy eyes on the line of bushes and invasive trees, scowling hard until the sound happens again. He sees a few branches stirring, and that warrants enough of a concern that the Sergeant whistles and directs the squad down the slippery embankment to investigate. He goes first, and the rest follow. 

Ben has a harder time on the slope, his heels digging into the silt and sliding. He would have eaten mud, if not for Hux grabbing him by the arm last minute.   
  


“You okay, man?”

“Yeah. M’ fine.”

Water laps at Ben’s boots as he touches down on the floodplain, the wet smell of earth and grass rising to tease at his nose. He uses his gun to push aside some of the foliage, peering through thick thatches of hip-high weeds to look for whatever had made the sound. A frown curdles his features.

There in the mud, pressed firmly between two large bouquets of switchgrass, is a human footprint. Fresh, still not filled with water despite the heavy rainfall. Ben whistles to Hux, and gestures to it. 

“Here.”

“Roamers?” Questions the Redhead, sauntering over with an almost irritating spring to his step. “What is it?”

“Tracks--”

Ben bends down and drops two fingers to the print, tracing the direction of the toes until he reaches to pull back another tuft of grass… and he sees another one. “Somethin’s been here. Really fuckin’ recently.”

Ben lifts his head to glance around for the rest of the squad, which had split into groups of two and now were combing the grassland to the north and south of Ben and Hux’s position. He gives his friend a pat on the shoulder, “Let’s see where this trail goes. I don’t wanna be jumped by anything on our way back.”

“Smart,” Hux mutters. 

The dark-haired man takes point, sinking his boots into the muck and following the trail, which now has become quickly apparent among the bushes and scattered trees of the Platt river’s floodplain. He stalks forward, gripping his AR-15 in white-knuckled anxiety the further he gets from the bank. 

A soft rattle registers in Ben’s ears, and he hisses, lifting his weapon.

The grass rustles as the creature flees, and the pair of men break into a run after it, their guns slapping against their sides, breath coming fast and hard, until finally…

A thing which had once been a human crawls tentatively out into the light. Its eyes are shiny with something like sadness, bloodshot and connected via red tendrils to the growing chutes of flora pushing up through the skin. Its breathing is labored, rasped, the slow start of a rattle choking its way out of ruined lungs and a parched throat. It was a young woman, once. A girl who still had her blonde hair in a ponytail when she’d finally turned, and wore a friendly looking pink dress that had been ripped at one of the shoulders, exposing her right breast. 

Ben’s eyes moisten, and he lifts his gun to end the thing with a pronounced pop. 

The rest of patrol is mostly uneventful. No Firefly spottings, no more Infected activity besides the lone Stalker Ben had put down. He was glad for the calm… especially after their rocky start.

Something about that stalker… the way her single unpenetrated eye gleamed with despair, stuck in his throat like a pill he’d swallowed dry. There was no way to prove it, but that look… he could swear she was thinking. She was looking at him, trying to convey how sorry she was for the flesh under her fingernails and the blood smeared over her mottled, livery mouth. 

Or maybe it wasn’t sorrow at all, but a request to be put out of her misery. 

Either way, as their shift comes to an end and Ben is relieved of his armor and weapons, he tries to put the thing out of his mind. Usually there wasn’t too much of a break between patrol shifts, but it hadn’t stopped the cadets from striking up impromptu poker and blackjack games to pass the time until the next shift demanded attention. Returning to the main headquarters, Ben can’t help but foster a good-natured grin as he watches his fellow soldiers sit down and lay out their bets. He can’t look at the red cards, though. Too reminiscent of the blood that still speckled his sculpted face like a mist of paint. 

He takes up a beer instead, plopping down in a metal folding chair next to Phasma while Hux throws down a trio of firefly pendants as his bet. 

“Hit me--” Hux demands, slapping the two of his cards with faux aggression. The dealer, some guy from a few dorms over, sets down a two, and then he turns his own card over. 

Twenty-two. Ben chuckles and Hux curses as the Dealer drags his spoils off the floor and shoves them into his pockets, crooked yellow teeth flashing in a manic grin. 

“We should play somethin’ when we all get back, tonight,” Ben suggests, his voice still warm with amusement at his friend’s loss. “I have that deck I won from Sloane.”

Phasma’s pale features flush red under her headscarf, and she chuckles softly in reply. “I would like that very much.”

“How are you doin’ so far? Settlin’ in alright?”

The Girl rolls her head and shrugs her shoulders, lifting a white hand to motion so-so. Ben nods, and he pats the back of Phasma’s chair in an attempt to seem comforting. “You’ll get used to it after a while. Where did you transfer in from?”

“Las Vegas.”

_“Really?”_

For some reason, it’s difficult to imagine this sweet girl living somewhere like Vegas. He leans toward her in his chair, but is careful not to touch any part of her uniform, mouth drawing wide into an incredulous smile. “That must have been something. How’s the ol’ Battle-Born state holding up these days?”

“Not so well. It was overrun recently.”

The smile fades. “Are you serious?”

Phasma nods, her shiny eyes losing their luster almost instantaneously. She folds her hands in her lap, and bounces her knees along to the gentle thrum of the fan’s oscillation behind them. “There was a rash of infected in the QZ, and then… well, one of the soldiers got infected, and infected plenty of the other ones. Many of my friends didn’t make it.”

For some reason, the Stalker comes to mind again. The same sadness present in that infected’s eyes is here, in Phasma as well. He wonders if that Stalker had really been conscious this whole time… if she’d seen her death coming and resigned herself to it. Ben knows he wouldn’t have wanted to live as a monster either. 

“I’m sorry,” Ben offers. “Is there any way I can help you feel better?”

“A hug might be nice.”

He smiles, and leans over to wrap his arms tentatively around the young woman, a sigh falling loosely from his mouth. Ben buries his face in her shoulder and realizes just too quickly how long it’s been since somebody touched him. His skin whines softly, lamenting its newfound loneliness. 

“Y’know, I thought it was against your religion to be hugging and doing the handshakes...Oh, shit. Do I sound ignorant? I’m sorry.”

Phasma squeezes him hard in return. 

“Not all Muslim women like to hug. But I do. There ain’t enough hugging these days.” She chuckles. “You’re fine.”

They finally let each other go, and Ben relinquishes his grip with a kind clap of his hand on her back. The game on the floor turns to poker, and a few more of the cadets fall into a circle around a growing “pot” of spoils. Firefly pendants, ration cards, ammunition, confiscated goodies like rings and necklaces and candy bars pile into a horde at the center, and Hux breaks out the cards to shuffle and deal for their game of Texas Hold-Em.

“Wait--”

Ben slips out of his chair and finds a place next to his redheaded friend, reaching into his pocket for a handful of coins. “Deal me in. I’ve got--”

_“Ladies!”_ Snoke yells from a corner, pounding his fist on one of the walls. “Let’s get moving. Firefly attack out by the university. Get your gear on and let’s kill these sum’bitches.”

* * *

Ben sucks his teeth as he rides bitch on the Humvee, The rain spraying grey droplets at his plastic visor with the gale force of bullets. His hand aches on the door’s outer handle, the urge to let go and ease the pain in his fingers almost as strong as the growing fire building in his stomach as they near the Casper College campus. 

A dark cloud blooms upward in the shape of a mushroom, reaching toward the sky with black, crackling fingers. Fire engulfs three buildings, and from the windows of others, firecrackers burst from windows as those inside retaliate against the shooters just now arriving at the front line. As soon as the car slows enough, he jumps to the pavement, landing in a crouch with his feet and one of his hands to the ground. 

He breaks into a sprint and slides back into cover, next to one of the other Sergeants closing in on the scene. Breathlessly, Ben sputters-- “What the fuck happened here, Pal?”

“God damn fireflies,” The Sergeant mutters, leaning out of cover to fire off a volley toward the fireflies leaning out of various windows. Something explodes and a flash of light illuminates the Sergeant’s face, before he leans back out of the line of fire and glances back at the shivering **_Corp._** Ben Solo. “Two basement bombs got the Science building. We got a fuckin’ _mole,_ Solo. Someone is lettin’ these bastards in.”

The Sergeant lifts an arm to wipe the sweat out of his eyes. “Let’s move up. C’mon.”

Ben braces a hand on his superior’s back and the two duck, moving forward to a cluster of crates hiding more garrisoned troops. 

“Sergeant Palpatine,” Whispers a voice as the two close in. “They got us pinned down. What the fuck are we doin’?”

Palpatine turns and grabs Ben by his shoulder, gesturing with his free arm toward the next conceivable cover point-- a crumbling marble sign about 30 feet away, right next to the infested building’s front door. “Look, kid. I seen you move. You’re fast. You can do this, alright?”

_“Sir--”_

“Don’t argue this,” Palpatine mumbles, “Get in there and kill those bastards. We’ll cover you.”

Ben casts his dark eyes up at the building, gulping down a breath of hot air before he finally ducks his head, rolls his shoulders, and makes a mad dash for the sign. Fireflies spot him instantly, a hail of bullets coming from above and from his front, plinking off ruined cars and tearing up archipelagoes of asphalt. 

Something hard hits him square in the chest and he goes down, managing to skid into place beside the sign. He wheezes against the pain in his chest, grappling to his vest to check for holes. He drags the bullet out from the vest, and tosses it aside, doubling over in an attempt to catch his breath again. 

“Fuck…” He breathes, hands covering his head. Ben peeks above cover, and shoulders the large gun. He lifts suddenly, shooting a hail of bullets into the front lobby, a spray of blood painting the glass as it shatters before crumbling men and women. A few shots ring out from the building, and Ben ducks just in time to watch the tree behind him catch it in an explosion of bark. 

Ben, still unable to catch his breath, sucks in deep gulps of air as he lifts out of cover again and sprays bullets across the front of the building. The gunfire continues at a speed so high it just sounds like vibration, until finally Ben’s gun clicks empty, and the whole of the lobby is riddled with bullets, bodies, and glass. 

Without thinking to duck again, he sprints the small gap between himself and the doorway, pushing in and immediately stumbling over two corpses curled in fetal positions. Ben falls forward onto his hands, glass shredding his palms, before he scrambles back to his feet and ducks into an alcove. Gasping, he shoves a new magazine into his gun, and bounds with reckless abandon toward the stairwell. 

The second floor is separated into two sides by a single narrow corridor, the man at the far end already having shot out the window and started to lay firepower down on the outside troops. 

Ben lifts his gun, and riddles the back of the man’s drab yellow uniform in bullets. 

“Fuck,” He hisses again, turning to kick in a door clearly labeled for some kind of chemistry class. Ben swings his gun into the classroom, glaring around the seats, and finding nobody. He pauses, sucks in a deep breath, and steps back out. 

The next classroom holds a pair of cowering fireflies, both women, both with their guns thrown down. He stares at them, slack-jawed, before hooking his thumb backwards and uttering the gruff order to EXIT THROUGH THE FRONT DOOR WITH YOUR HANDS RAISED AND TURN YOURSELVES IN. 

Once the two women are down the stairs, he’s satisfied enough to close the door behind himself… when two shots ring out from the very end of the hall and searing pain washes through him. 

Ben falls, wheezing, grasping uselessly at the hole in his hip. Blood pours between his fingers, soaks his navy fatigues with the relentless rush of a river. He tries to lift his head, and his gun, searching for the bastard who had shot him… when the cold muzzle of a pistol is forced against his temple. 

“Drop it.”

His fingers release the gun and it clatters uselessly to the carpet. He can hear somebody kick it away. 

“How bad is he hurt?” Asks a male voice, one he quickly pins to a black man in a green duster. The one holding the gun to his head curses, and jabs it hard against his temple. 

“He’s fine. Just a _flesh wound.”_

“You think he could be it?”

“No idea.”

Ben’s eyes roll sightlessly in their sockets, catching a brief glimpse of the Firefly holding a gun to his head. He’s a tan man, maybe Latino, with the scruffy start of a biker mustache and a cigarette hanging off his lower lip. The man notices Ben looking at him and gives him another hard beating with the gun. 

“You,” The black man says, “You know where the stockpile is?”

“S...h... _shtock_... _pile?”_ In the moment the word doesn’t make sense. Nothing makes sense except for the pounding in his skull, the hard beat of his blood as it rushed to his scalp, already forming a bruise. 

“Yeah, pretty boy. The stockpile. Your guns.” 

“Poe--”

“Fuck it, this guy don’t know nothin’--”

The tan man, now identified as Poe, lifts his pistol for the last time and brings it down hard on Ben’s temple, and everything fades to black.


	2. Chapter 2

_“Mama?”_

_He rubs at the pink groove worn into his cheek, fingers manipulating baby fat, that rosy swollen flesh that hadn’t been there since he was 12. The slash itches like it’s fresh, but he knows… somehow, he knows that it can’t be. He waddles around the kitchen in his little boy’s dungarees, toes skating over the flagstone tiling coquettishly, afraid to touch the cracks where one tile became more._

_Step on a crack and you’ll break your mama’s back! Step on a line and you’ll break your father’s spine!_

_Ben looks around for his mother, dragging fingernails that are much too long over the slash. The itching doesn’t stop, and now his fingers are wet. He pulls the hand away, and cringes at the small smears of blood under his nails, which he attempts to pick out while he mildly climbs up onto a chair and plops down._

_“Mama, I saw a horsie today,” He says, and his voice is small. A squeaky little flute. “I wasn’t allowed to pet it though. His owner says it bites.”_

_Leia stands at the sink across the kitchen from him, her sleeves rolled up and both arms thrust into soapy water. She hums a song… something from one of dad’s records. A tune that came low with four D notes, lifted for an E, and dropped once again for five A’s. We all live in a yellow submarine.... Ben smiles at it. He loves when mama hums._

_“Can we get a horse?” He questions, “I’d take care of it. I promise.”_

_“You have a dog already, Ben,” Leia says, her voice so tender and sweet it could cause cavities. “And you hardly take care of poor little Ren. I have to do all the work.”_

_“I can take care of Ren!” He cries, “I can take care of both of them!”_

_“Tell you what,” Leia purrs, “If you start walking Ren regularly, feeding him… bathing him… I might get you a pony. Deal?”_

_“Deal!”_

_Ben clambers down from his chair, scrambling across the kitchen to hug the back of his mother’s legs. His small arms circle her thighs, his face burying into the side of her knee as he shakes violently with excitement. But her skin isn’t warm, like he’d thought it would be. It’s not pliable beneath her long skirt, is almost… hard to the touch._

_“Mama…?”_

_Leia turns her head and looks down at him, and she smiles the gap-toothed eternal grin of the infected. Her face is split in two by two fan shaped, bioluminescent fungal plates, and instead of her sweet, matronly voice, comes a rattle._

Ben Solo wakes on a dirty carpet. 

The room is dark beyond a small camp lantern at his side, illuminating the bandaged remains of what had been the vicious gunshot holes at his hip and thigh. He eyes them, wary of the pockmarks of blood stippling the bandages, wondering just how fucked he was going to be when infection set in and rotted his flesh away.

Something smells like it’s festering in the room, already. His eyes roll blindly about the space, trying in vain to look past the veil of darkness that cloaked everything beyond his body and the floor, but nothing registers. 

He can’t move. 

Ben gasps softly at the stale air, trying to wiggle his toes, to make sure that he could still feel them. His largest toe flicks at the air, and just the single nerve being activated sets off the others like a chain. His skin burns around the wounds, blistering in real time with the heat of his own pain, hot coals set into his flesh and fusing the gases around like miniature suns. 

He manages to bend his knees, and push himself up into a sit, eyes rolling wildly around the room now for something-- any kind of indication as to where he was. 

Ben is nude save for his underwear. Moisture trickles down from above and lands at the hollow between his nipples, where his chest became the pronounced slats of his ribs. 

“I hope it isn’t hurting too badly.” A voice murmurs from the dark. It belongs to a girl, still holding that chime of youth, only barely cured by the onset of womanhood. She must still have a way to go. 

A match strikes, and it moves around the room, lighting candle after candle until her silhouette is visible in the dull illumination. It doesn’t take a man with a photographic memory to put a name to her face. Round with baby fat, her brows thick and covered by dark flyaways from a braid, Rey Niima stands there, her thin chest puffed with… pride?

“I never… sewed someone up before. I mean, I have, but… I only ever practiced on the dead ones.” Her face shines with sweat, exhilaration. “Are you feeling okay? Can I get you anything?”

Ben’s lips crack, and he rasps out : _w...wahh..ter._

Rey turns to a worktable covered in various tools, and finds a half-empty water bottle she must have been drinking from herself. She bends to one knee beside him, uncapping it in her slender fingers before pushing the lip to his mouth. Ben gulps greedily at the moisture, each swallow taking down more and more, until the bottle crackled under the pressure of his sucking. Empty. 

Water pearls at the corners of his mouth and he lifts a hand to wipe them away. 

“Better?” Her voice peals. It hurts his ears. “I can get you more water if you want. We have a raincatch set up outside so--”

“No, I don’t want no more goddamn water,” He growls, if only to shut her up. “I want you and your punk-ass buddies to put me back.”

“Oh.”

Rey stands again, wringing her hands and stepping away to mutter something beneath her breath. She finds something small and metallic on the workbench, and before Ben can identify it, she’s holding it in his direction. 

“I… I can’t do that, I’m sorry. Unkar said I needed to keep you here until the others get back and figure out what to do with you.” She shifts nervously from side to side, weight changing from right foot to left and back again. “I helped you though. I didn’t want you to… well, they were… they were going to just leave you the way you were.”

“I was studying to be a medic before the Fireflies took me,” She prattles on, “I think I did pretty good on your stitches!”

Ben stares incredulously, “You took the bullets out, right?”

“Yeah! Lucky for you, they didn’t even break apart or anything.”

Ben slumps until he’s laying on the floor again, tired eyes opening and closing slowly at the circle of ceiling lit by the camp lantern. “Are they gonna kill me?”

“Poe’s thinking about it. Finn said not to.” She shrugs. 

Ben lifts both his hands to rub the fitful sleep from his eyes, the image of his infected mother still burned deeply into his corneas. He knows she wasn’t infected. He didn’t even really know if she was dead or not. She’d just vanished from the zone one night, taken his father with her, and left the spraypainted insignia of the fireflies behind them. 

That was it. No letter. No phone call. Just… radio static in place of a goodbye. 

His flesh aches, the damaged muscle complaining as he shifts onto his unwounded side to find some semblance of comfort. “Can I have my shirt at least?”

“No… I cut ‘em off you because you were too heavy to try to undress. You can have one of my shirts, though!”

Ben stares. This girl clearly didn’t seem to understand the concept of their size difference.

She grins, as if knowing what he was thinking about, and waves it off. Rey’s blossom lips curl fiendishly, “I wear them bigger. Don’t look at me like that. I’m not stupid.”

The man’s dark locks halo around his head on the carpet. He drops a hand to rest over the bandage on his hip, his fingers running over the soggy circles where his blood had seeped through. His mind races with thoughts of home, his dinky little shared dorm that smelled of mold and feet, Hux and Sloane in their bunks whispering to each other at night. Phasma getting up to pray. Snoke beating their door down at four in the morning to go on a run around the wall perimeter. 

Tears roll down his nose and moisten the carpet, and he wipes them away.

He’s going to die here. 

Ben hardly notices the large bang upstairs, or Rey’s nervous chattering as footsteps rumbled downward just behind her. His head is underwater. He’s drowning. He scrunches his eyes as numerous shadows come toward him… not wanting to see.

**_I’m going to die here. I’m going to die here. I’m going to die--_ **

“Check it out-- he’s awake.”

Poe crouches down next to Ben, and gives him a hard poke in his thin gut. There’s a grin in his voice, “C’mon Pretty boy, open them nice little eyes so we can chat like honest adults, eye-to-eye.”

He cracks one, and levels a stare of all the malice and hatred he can muster at the man’s face. 

Poe smiles, “There we go. Now that ain’t so bad, is it?”

Ben turns over onto his back, and yanks his legs up to his chest in a single arduous burst of movement. Electricity shoots up and down his leg, rattling his bones and causing the limb to shake violently. His voice comes and it’s a whisper so full to brimming with hate that it scares himself. “Just get this overwith.”

“Fine.”

Poe unfolds a piece of paper about the size of a dinner menu, and shoves it in Ben’s face. It’s a map of the Casper QZ, marked up with various notes about FEDRA and infected and tunnels. 

“Point out the stockpile,” Poe orders, his voice booming with faux authority. “And don’t you dare try to lie, or I’ll know.”

Ben’s eyes flick up to Poe’s face and stare back in silent defiance. He doesn’t answer, doesn’t lift a hand to do anything, just stares. His gaze is met by the tan man’s instantly, and a quiet war rages in the space between them. Poe’s face is ravaged by scars, and his gaze tells the story of a life lived at war. He can’t be older than twenty. He must have been born after the world fell. 

Something hard comes down on Ben’s knee, and the man cries out. 

A hammer. 

“Point out the goddamn stockpile, Pretty boy,” Growls Poe, “I don’t mind breakin’ both your knees.”

“Poe!” Rey’s voice now, “Don’t do that, it’s _cruel--”_

“Shut up.”

Ben’s upper lip curls, and he jams a finger against the squares that made up Casper College, not caring to refer to which building it was he was gesturing to. The pain coursing through him is poison, curdling his blood, melting at his muscles and tendons until his whole leg is a font of pure, white-hot agony. 

Poe’s eyes light up. “Which one?”

Ben levels a sneer at him. “Figure it out yourself.”

“Oh no, buddy, you’re gonna show us which one it is,” Poe coos, folding up the map again, “Finn, get his arms.”

Ben rears back as the other firefly from the college approaches him, recoiling, his face twisted with nerves. Finn, his dark eyes shiny with apprehension, grabs Ben’s arms and yanks them behind his back, twisting his wrists into rough ropes that bite hard into his flesh and rub his skin red.

Ben’s body is dragged up until he’s standing unsteadily on his feet, and he’s having to lean back against Finn to keep from falling over.

They usher him up the stairs and out the door, still nude, out into the dark maze of streets that made up area three. Rain taps his shoulders as it falls, clear beads collecting on his pale skin and soaking his dark hair. It’s fucking cold out here. 

Ben’s mouth opens, and the hard barrel of Poe’s pistol juts against his jaw. 

“Don’t you make a fuckin’ sound. You talk? I make you eat a bullet, understand?”

Ben nods, and the company drags him, down roads and through sidestreets, the rain soaking them all and him especially. His long hair lays in angry, sopping ribbons plastered to his forehead, the ridiculous curves of his ears showing through twin breaks where his hair had parted to let them free. He wants to hide them, even though he knows it doesn’t really matter anymore.

He’s going to die. He knows that. 

The Fireflies drag him into the Casper complex through a break in the wall, quietly hugging the shadows of buildings to avoid the various patrol until they reach the cluster of squares Ben had pointed to earlier. Brick facades are covered by invasive crawling greens, signs rubbed away, replaced with graffiti and char marks where past conflicts still scarred the outside. 

“Which one?” Poe hisses, jabbing the gun into Ben’s jaw again. “I tol’ you I’d know if you lie.”

Ben eyes him, lips pressing together in a hard line. 

Poe curses beneath his breath and grabs for the wound on Ben’s hip, tearing the bandage open and jamming two of his dirty fingers into the small hole left by a shortage of sewing thread. Ben’s mouth opens to scream, but a hand is clapped over it before he can even manage to choke out a watery cry. Finn’s. 

The fingers worm like parasites against his inside, scratching at tissues and displacing proteins and pushing hard against the damaged muscle. 

Tears stream from Ben’s eyes, and he cocks his head toward the brick pile that had once been the Life Science building. Anything to stop the twisting of digits in his flesh from further tearing the stitching that Rey had done. 

Poe’s fingers withdraw from the wound and he wipes them off on his jeans, before waving everyone but Finn toward it. “Set the firecrackers and let’s get the fuck outta here.”

“Finn...Drop him there. He ain’t goin’ nowhere. An’ stuff something in his mouth.”

Finn’s grip loosens, and the tall man deposits Ben gently on the asphalt, a care pattern unlike Poe had shown, and stuffs a cloth that tastes vaguely of motor oil in his teeth. Ben shivers as his flesh touches the wet road, and he tugs on his bindings uselessly, watching in mute horror as the group of fireflies unload their packs full of what could only be explosives. 

Ben muffles yells around his gag, rolling onto his back with a hiss and manipulating his wrists against the asphalt, rubbing his flesh and the fibrous ropes into the ground. 

Something gives just as the building erupts into a shower of particles and flame, and his rope comes free at the very moment the fireflies scatter to the wind. He spits his gag out and climbs weakly to his feet, unable to do anything but stare at the building in flames, and hold his side, eyes gleaming orange in horror and rage, reflecting fire both inside and out. 

**_Kill the fireflies. Kill the fucking fireflies._ **

He could have been standing there for two seconds or two hours, it made no difference. Ben is stuck, staring at the building as it burns, listening to the patter of approaching footsteps and the warbled cry of his fellow FEDRA agents discovering what had happened. 

Something cracks against the back of his head, fireworks spreading through his skull in veins and vessels, and suddenly he’s being dragged again, off the road and into the grassland just beyond the campus. 

Ben opens his mouth to cry out, “Hel--!”

“Shut the fuck up,” Finn murmurs, jamming his meaty hand back on Ben’s mouth. “I’m saving your ass. Just shut up.”

“I saw him!” Cries a voice. “He was here!”

“Where is he?”

“Fucking traitor!”

Ben’s heart sinks. They think he did this. They think he defected and set this bomb off. He scrambles back into the field beside Finn, hands gripping at the soft, moist earth uselessly, tears pouring from the corners from his eyes. Phasma is there, her gun out, yelling something to the other Cadets that he can’t quite hear. 

His wet eyes scrunch closed, and he turns his head away. 

In the Casper QZ, there is no such thing as a fair trial. As soon as you’re discovered in crime, that’s it. You get a bullet to the brain and nobody asks questions. It doesn’t matter if you’re innocent or not. 

Ben had admired that policy just a day ago, but now he aches, weeping for some way he could explain himself, tell them that it wasn’t him, it was these fucking fireflies.

**_But it was you, Ben. You led them here._ **

**_My fault. My fault this happened._ **

Finn drags Ben back into the switchgrass, and then the two disappear into the dark, vanishing down alleyways and into the pitch-black maze of Casper, Ben’s legs aching all the way. 

* * *

When a coyote is faced with danger, there are two options: Run, or fight. In most cases, it’s in the coyote’s nature to run; despite living in large family groups, coyotes tend to venture out alone when trying to hunt. Without the numbers, a Coyote has little chance of winning a fight with another predator. This doesn’t make the animal a coward, just a prideless creature focused on survival. 

Ben stares at himself in the cracked mirror of Rey’s bathroom and wonders if he was a coward rather than a coyote. He should have turned himself in, taken the bullet to the head and joined his family in the bliss of the other side. Should have.

But he’d run. And now, what was he?

Rey’s novelty THE BASH t-shirt fits perfectly, and it smells deeply of her. He pulls the collar to his nose, inhaling. The fabric is perfumed with a scent of generic soap, skin, the delicious sweat of a young woman and a faint air of… mildew.

The jeans are Finn’s, and they’re a bit big, but Ben doesn’t mind that. It feels good to be covered. His skin is still rashed with gooseflesh, his nose pink and running with snot. Ben drags a towel through his long hair, ruffling it dry and then pulling it down to wipe his nose. 

A soft rap on the door stirs him from his brooding. 

“Mr. Solo?” She asks, tentatively against the door, “Are you doing okay?”

“M’fine.”

“Does the shirt fit? I can get a bigger one. I have lots of them, Unkar found this whole warehouse once--”

Shit. There she goes again.

“No, no, Rey. I’m fine. It fits great.”

He opens the door to see the girl standing there, her slender body thin with hunger and clad in an oversized tee that’s blue and emblazoned with white church print. She folds her hands in front of her, eyes lifting to look at him. They’re hazel, he notes, the texture of polished granite, brown and green and freckled with russet lines jutting out from the center. 

Ben swallows, and reaches out to grab the girl by the shoulders. He moves her out of his way, and clambers back out into the carpeted room, looking at nothing in particular as he scans for a place to sit down. He chooses a ratty old couch. 

“I should have given you a jacket or something before they took you,” She whispers, “Are you okay? I can get some--”

“Rey.” He stares at her, brows furrowing. “Shut up. Quit worryin’ about me, I ain’t any of your concern anymore, alright?”

She visibly deflates, and mouths a soft ‘oh’. 

He almost feels bad for that. Almost. She was just a kid, after all, didn’t know much better than this. Being a chatterbox wasn’t the worst thing a girl could be. But he can’t apologize. It’d mean admitting that he cared about this girl’s feelings. And he DOESN’T.

Ben ducks his head and leans until he’s laying longways on the couch, facing away from the room so that he can brood in peace. 

He remembers in the back of his mind his mother recounting to him the Parable of the Coyotes. Her lipsticked mouth moving as she whispered of a coyote who questioned his own nature, who wondered why they howled at the moon and continued to ask about their ways. As he can recall, the rest of the Coyote family resented the one who questioned, and specifically confronted him after another long night of endless queries. 

_‘You have continually questioned the howling of the pack, even though we have made it clear that your “findings” are unwelcome. You have been ostracized and relegated to the lowliest job we could think of, and still you have not learned. We cannot tolerate your questioning of the wisdom of the pack or that of our great ancestors. You leave us no choice but to banish you.’_

_Trembling the coyote replied: ‘But the pack is the only life I have known.’_

_‘For the good of the pack and your own safety you must leave. You are no longer a coyote as far as we are concerned.’ Then with eyes like burning embers and a sharp, toothy grin, the others asked, 'Do you remember what we call those who are not coyotes?'_

_Too frightened to speak, the coyote meekly shook his head and said ‘No.’_

_‘We call them prey.’_

Ben can practically smell his mother’s sweet scent, feel her white sweater between his thumb and forefinger. He can remember her so vividly. It’s hard to believe that she had just vanished, merely disappeared without a single trace or clue as to where she’d gone. 

Sniffling that isn’t his own rouses him from his thoughts. He pauses for a moment before turning over, looking to the dirty mattress thrown on the floor in the corner… 

Where Rey is weeping in the throes of fitful sleep.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> :0 I'm on tumblr at bigfoot-pocky if y'all wanna chat!!!


	3. Chapter 3

The vicious sounds of rutting fill his mind as he’s sucking down thin soup. He can see the couple in his mind’s eye, a man and a woman, the man of average height and build, and the woman thin. Too thin. Her body is starving and marbled only at the cheeks and thighs with any semblance of fat. The man has her by the hair, he’s pounding into her from behind. Her mouth is open, and her face… her face is twisted, because she’s crying. Ben can’t decide if the crying is good or bad. 

Arousal compliments the aroma of his soup. He spoons up a generous portion of recycled noodles and pigeon meat, certain to make sure he had a healthy serving of potato skins and crumbles of stale pork rinds before shoving the whole ensemble into his mouth. He swallows hard as the woman begins to cry out, in warbled, miserable bursts. 

Ben stares hard into his bowl, his blood flowing south to his nether regions. He tries to ignore it, finishing off the solids in his soup before lifting it to drink the broth directly from the brim, nearly choking when she cries out again, and a hard thunk vibrates through the house. The woman is crying louder, and Ben concludes that it’s the bad kind.

Moments later, the door at the end of the hall opens and Rey waddles out, her eyes puffy with tears. A bruise shades her pronounced cheekbone, and Ben feels his heart sinks as he realizes she was the one yelling and crying. Behind her, Unkar Plutt strolls out in his boxers and wifebeater, slimy forehead slick with exertion, before he turns in the opposite direction and walks off, scratching his ass as he goes. 

Rey’s eyes don’t meet his. She walks slowly down the hall, curling her toes against the carpet and sniffling. 

“Rey?” He asks, despite his own gruff nature toward the girl. “Rey…? Are you alright?”

No answer. She merely pauses at the door down to the basement, and lifts a hand to wipe her snot, before descending the stairs into the guts of the house. 

He sets his bowl in the sink, and his hard member begins to soften again as a tide of guilt flows through him. Ben goes to the basement door, and descends, finding the girl in her oversized shirt and messy braid at the center of the room. She’s doing something… But he can’t really figure out what that something is. 

Rey seems to be scouring her skin with the rough side of a kitchen sponge, rubbing her thighs and her cunt without any semblance of mercy. Ben’s cock hurts in sympathy to it. 

“Rey?”

She jumps, and the sponge bounces off to one side. 

Ben’s eyes settle on her, and he’s filled, suddenly, with a deep sadness. Besides the bruise on her cheek, there are many on her chest, and on her thighs. Marks he hadn’t seen the first time. He crouches down, staring at her, “Are you okay?”

“I’m okay,” She whispers.

But her eyes are overflowing. She crawls on her hands and knees over to him and throws her arms around his neck when she’s finally close enough. Ben stiffens. He pats her on the back, trying not to feel too awkward about her body pressing so tightly to his own. He’d never been a hugger. He could make an exception for this sad girl, though. 

“He’s hurting you,” Ben states, his voice unintentionally harsh, “Isn’t he?”

Rey clings to him silently, staining his shirt with her tears. 

Ben gathers the girl into his arms and moves over to the mattress on the floor, before dumping her on it without any semblance of grace. He drags a quilt over her, and grunts a quiet ‘wait here’, before he turns and makes to leave. 

Of course, he also grabs the sponge before he goes, making a note to chuck it somewhere she couldn’t get to it again. 

Upstairs, the Firefly safehouse is mostly quiet, save for the soft rustling of some sleepers in various rooms, and the exchanged murmurs of men and women plotting to attack FEDRA encampments in new and horrifying ways. That deep, buried part of him itches violently. It has ever since he first woke up here. He could kill these fireflies, slaughter all of them. He was trained enough. 

But it wouldn’t make any difference. He was a wanted man, labeled for the punishment of being shot on sight. 

Ben pushes into a large family room, and catches sight of Unkar Plutt and a few of his skeezy firefly buddies hunched over a table. Ben limps over to the men, and clamps a hand viciously on the back of Plutt’s neck. Softly, his voice dripping with malice, “Hey, buddy? I just wanna have a chat with ya. Let’s go.”

His leg hurts but he pushes through the pain, guiding Plutt out of the room and into the hall, where he delivers a hard right hook to the man’s fat nose. 

“You like hurtin’ little girls?” Ben hisses, using Plutt being caught off guard to swing his hand downward and grab the man hard by the impression of his cock and balls through the boxers. He squeezes with all the force he can muster, “Is that what you like, huh?” His dark eyes gleam with hate, “You’re a pitiful excuse for a man.”

Plutt wheezes, his nose dripping blood and his eyes brimming with tears. Ben squeezes harder. 

“Who taught you?” Ben hisses, “You forgot the most important fuckin’ rule we have as men, Plutt. You know what that is?”

Unkar shakes his head wildly, making pitiful attempts to pry Ben’s vice grip off his crotch. 

“We don’t rape.” Ben stares hard, flicking his wrist to put the twist on Unkar’s genitals. The other man cries out, and the former soldier uses his free hand to slam the back of Plutt’s head into the wall, a silent _ shut up. _ “You say that with me now. **_We. Don’t. Rape_**. You hear me?”

Plutt sputters out something that sounds like we don’t rape, and Ben’s vice grip on his cock and balls twists again, and he gives the most vicious yank he can manage, before finally releasing the man’s wounded genitals. Ben’s eyes flick down, and he’s satisfied at seeing a few flecks of blood forming just over the place where Plutt’s ruined cock had been.

“Don’t let me catch you doin’ it again.”

He gives the sleazebag guy another shove for good measure, before turning to head back to the basement. 

Rey is still down there, curled in a ball under her quilt and facing the rest of the room with tears in her pretty eyes. 

Ben doesn’t afford her more than a passing glance. His conscience clear now, he falls back onto the couch that he’d claimed and closes his eyes, daydreaming about his old friends to pass the time. 

He can imagine Hux whining about something like normal, maybe trying to put the moves on that new girl, Phasma. 

He’d mentioned on their patrol that he thought she was cute. Ben hopes, despite himself, that maybe he gets up the courage to ask her out on a date. 

Sloane and Yale would be inseparable as always, dominating poker and blackjack with their unfair amount of luck, stealing pendants and goodies away from their fellow soldiers with the ease of practiced thieves. 

His heart aches for his little family. They must hate him, the way they hate all insurrectionists. After all, he was branded a TRAITOR. A FIREFLY CONSPIRATOR.

Finn showed him the wanted photo last night. It had been printed fairly quickly. They’d used his ID shots, cast in the black and white of a criminal-- WANTED: BEN SOLO, FOR FIREFLY AFFILIATION. And then the young photo of him that had been taken when he first joined up with the Casper QZ’s government, nearly fifteen years before. 

Ben’s eyes open and it’s dark in the basement, the air occupied with the soft thrum of Rey’s breathing as she laid, catatonic, on her mattress. 

He hadn’t remembered falling asleep. 

Poe and Finn are in the corner of the basement at a table, a lamp pointed down at some kind of paper plan. A map, probably. They murmur to each other in hushed tones, not bothering to see who was in the room with them, if there was anybody nearby who might possibly be eavesdropping on the conversation.

Ben can’t be bothered to really listen, but he picks up bits of conversation here and there anyway.

_ Best bet is Alcova. _

_ Are you sure? _

_ Last I heard, a whole bunch’a guys were headed there to meet up with that girl’s old group. Abby, I think her name was. The surgeon’s daughter? _

_ Shit. Heard he got shot.  _

_ Yeah. _

Ben fidgets in place, his fingers diving into the pockets of his ill-fitting borrowed jeans to find a cigarette. He jams it into his teeth, chewing hard on the filter, and lighting up. The soft flick of his lighter doesn’t attract any attention besides that of the girl on the floor, who slowly sits up, and blinks the tears from her eyes. 

He presses a finger to his lips as they exchange glances. 

_ We should send the traitor out there. That way if he dies we aren’t losing anybody important.  _

_ But the girl is important.  _

_ So send a squad after them if we don’t hear back from the Alcova group. We don’t need to get our panties in a twist over this. She’s not that special. _

Ben frowns as he smokes and ashes his cigarette into a dirty mug, eyes greying with apprehension. Were they talking about Rey? Why would she need to be relocated? Why was she considered important?

_ They should get out of the QZ anyway. He’s got a price on his head and so does she.  _

_ We could smuggle them out tonight. It should be raining again. They’ll have enough cover to make it past the patrols.  _

_ What about infected? _

_ He should be able to take care of them.  _

_ The dude was shot twice and you smashed his knee, Poe. _

_ Guy was FEDRA, I’m sure they’ll be just fine. _

Now, both Poe and Finn slowly roll their heads together to look toward Ben, their gazes expectant. Neither of them say a word, and Ben doesn’t jump to break the silence either, but it seems that they don’t have to. It goes without saying that they’re all on the same page. Finn and Poe would smuggle Ben and Rey out of the walls, and they’d be expected to make it to Alcova to meet another group. One that belonged to a girl named… Abby, was it?

Ben’s eyes flick to Rey, and it seems she knows as well what was to happen,

Silently, she stands and picks up a backpack, and leans over to the small pile of folded laundry to find her shirts and pants for the trip. 

* * *

Finn leads the way through the seafoam gloom, his form nearly invisible in the late evening mist. It hadn’t rained, not quite, but a fog had rolled in and coated Casper like a blanket.

Escaping is the easy part. Getting past the rolling sweeps of spotlights rolling over the muddy trenches surrounding the wall? That was admittedly harder. This area had been hit particularly bad when the military had come through and bombed the shit out of everything, and large scoops of earth bear the stories of a time twenty years ago when stuffy old white guys thought that throwing fire and shrapnel at the problem would make it go away.

It’s hard to imagine how different the city smells compared to the outside unless you’ve experienced it. After a few days exposed to Casper’s rank odor, one’s senses would dull to it and begin to register it with the same indifference as the faint smears of blood that the streetsweepers were never able to wash off asphalt. But outside again? Ben takes a deep inhale of wet nature, and wonders just how he’d survived the city in the first place. 

About a mile out, Finn wishes them luck and turns back around, and as Ben limps the trash-strewn streets with Rey shadowing him, he wonders if everything might be okay. He misses his friends, his second family, hates himself for betraying them for the terrorists, but… what would they have done if they’d been in his shoes? Man’s main goal above all else is to continue surviving, damn the consequences. He’s only human. 

Still, that doesn’t make him feel much better. 

“Where are we going?” Her voice startles him.

“Uh… I think, the Alcova Reservoir. We gotta find the river and follow it. Pretty simple.”

“Can I hold your hand?”

Ben pauses, casting a skeptical look over his shoulder. “You want to hold my hand?”

Rey reaches out before Ben can protest, and her fingers curl around the meat of his large hand. They’re so small, such tiny little fingers, so bony and cold and bloodless as he returns the grip. He figures it’s better to just hold the girl’s hand than to protest… and besides, the exhange feels almost nice. Ben can keep better track of her this way, force her to keep up with him instead of lagging behind. 

They walk in silence, past a WAL-MART supercenter and through a park, to the overgrown bank of the North Platte River. Rey’s little yellow galoshes splash through puddles, sending up water in transparent green sprays that glitter under the slim scores of moonlight. 

“What’s your favorite color?” She asks, suddenly. “Mine is green.”

“Uh...I don’t know. All’a them, I guess.”

“You have to pick at least one. Or two,” Rey scowls up at him, the color slowly returning to her candy-apple cheeks. “Don’t make me guess.”

His side pinches as he pushes through the mud to the West, unconcerned for anything beyond just getting far enough to warrant ample rest. He knew his body was going to hurt when this was done. One of the biggest no-nos of gunshot wounds, at least in this day and age, was strenuous exercise after copious stitching.

He’d hate to have to sit through Rey fixing all that. 

“Red?” Ben questions, “Or, I don’t know. Blue. I like both of those.”

“What do you like about them?”

He scoffs, and gives her hand a squeeze, before lifting her small form back onto the bank to make their crossing via a fallen tree bridge. “I don’t know.”

“C’mon. You gotta like them for a reason.”

Ben pulls his hand out of hers and snorts quietly, “I guess… I like Red because my mama always had red lipstick, that’s what I remember most about her… blue, because my uncle gave me this super rad pen light just before all this shit hit. It shot blue lasers all over and I used to use it to bother the hell outta my dad when I visited home.”

“How did it bother him?”

“We had a dog,” Ben muses, “Ren the fifteenth, or something. Used to try to attack it. I’d always point the laser at his shoes or his shins or something. Always good for a laugh.”

Rey muses over that, now jamming her hands back into the deep pockets of her hoodie, “You miss them?”

His good humor dies in an instant. 

“We should probably be quiet till we find shelter for the night,” He mutters, “I don’t wanna attract any unwelcome attention.”

“I said something wrong, didn’t I? I’m sorry.”

He doesn’t answer her, taking point on their little expedition once again and trying to ignore the throb of electrical pulses through his ankles, up to his knees and out the sucking wounds still lovingly bandaged beneath his wet clothes. Ben leads for a while, his mind swimming with the old trucker’s adage: scan, don’t stare. 

Of course, he wasn’t driving. But walking here in the dark, no clear goal in mind besides the winding stretch of the river as it twisted West to the reservoir, road hypnosis is just the same. 

Rey sticks close to his side. 

Surprisingly, the city is quiet. Casper had only the population of 60 thousand in the time before the world had gotten sick, so it was a decently silent place before, but now the college town with its barren outlands and hippie businesses worn into rubble is deader than a graveyard. 

Off in the distance, the shrieks of clickers and stalkers occupy the empty caverns of buildings, the windows of desiccated churches and apartments plucked out and shattered into thousands of triangular shards. 

Ben feels sick to his stomach. Abandoned buildings tended to remind him of rotting corpses-- in that their eyes were often picked out first, and then the rest was consumed with the aching slowness of water weathering rock. Houses in particular bothered him the most. He couldn’t help thinking of the people who had lived in there before. What might have happened to them.

Maybe somebody thought the same thing when they’d encountered his childhood home. He humors the thought that maybe… maybe there was somebody who cared to look through his family’s keepsakes, and wonder about the sad-eyed boy with the long dark hair.

Ben feels bad for shutting Rey down. 

“...Why is green your favorite color?” He asks, surprising even himself. 

Rey tentatively picks up her pace so that the two are walking side by side again. “My mother’s eyes were green. That’s all I remember of her.”

“Really?”

“Mm. She was taken away when I was… I don’t know, four, maybe?”

Ben’s brows furrow. “What happened to her?”

“I don’t know. Unkar took me in, said that she’d be back for me one day. But… it’s been twelve years. Almost thirteen. I don’t know whether I should give up hope or not.”

“Oh… How did you get mixed up with the fireflies, then?”

“Well,” She starts, seemingly happy to talk again, “Before I was a firefly I was in that boarding school where they train kids to be soldiers. Unkar put me in it, said it’d be good for me, but I think he just wanted his house to himself.”

“...Anyway… I was trainin’ to be a field medic with them, and… uh… well, one of my friends was bitten. I didn’t report it. I… I helped her escape instead of putting her down, and when they found out? I was in pretty major trouble. They were gonna kick me out of the city, so… I left. I hooked up with Finn and he got me in.”

Rey pulls her pendant out from her hoodie to show him, and he finds himself feeling almost sorry for her. The little pendant is bent and the printing is crooked, but there’s the emblem, and then her name, REY NIIMA, emblazoned into the metal in a clumsy formal font. 

She plays with the necklace for a moment longer before tucking it back against her chest, and pressing her hand over it. 

“Why did you join FEDRA?” She asks.

A question he hadn’t been expecting. He stops at the side of the river, and bends to collect up a handful of water to draw through his already damp locks. “Uh… Fireflies took a lot from me in those early years. I’ve seen them do some… hideous things.”

“The military’s done some hideous things too.”

He couldn’t argue with that. 

_ After all, look at what had happened to him.  _

Another few miles out of the QZ, with minimal infected encounters, the pair stumble upon a set of prefabricated homes and apartments lovingly known as COTTONWOOD ACRES. 

The building they choose is a stucco wedding cake with boarded windows and a door painted green, the interior foyer a damp, moist cave of soggy newspaper clippings and urine where animals had taken shelter and relieved themselves. Ben leads them up a small flight of stairs, to a quiet apartment at the very end of a hall festooned with doors that had been lovingly nailed shut. 

The apartment itself had belonged to a man. Ben could tell by the reek of sweat that still permeated the air here, and the bachelor pad furnishings. 

Rey, of course, gets the couch, while Ben takes an old recliner pushed against a wall. Neither of them are brave enough to try the bed. 

Ben strips off his wet clothes, save for a pair of damp boxers, and hangs them up on a potrack placed just above the kitchen island. He’s quickly followed by Rey, who peels hers off just next to him without fear of being seen.

Of course, he made his best attempt to keep his eyes off her when she was looking, but when her gaze was off him? His eyes devour her young body, the scars and bruises that decorate her. Her panties are a sweet pink, and decorated in some off-brand type hello kitty, and her bra is of a matching rosy color, though the brand is different. It’s a woman’s bra, a bit too big for her. 

It catches her shirt as she pulls it down over her thin body. 

He feels bad for looking at her, swallowing both confusing lust and shame as he finally finishes up with his business. Ben might have been the one to put Plutt back in his place, but what did this make him?

When the two finally fall into place into their respective beds for the evening, they don’t sleep. Their eyes meet in the dark, staring intensely without pause for what feels like an eternity. 

As expected, the night passes slowly.


	4. Chapter 4

In the grey light of morning, the apartment is even more pathetic than he’d first thought. Posters paper the far wall, bragging of nerdy sci-fi movies and video games and signed photos of various actors. His blood chills as he sees his own face plastered to the wall, cast in the dramatic blue characteristic of a hero. Ben’s eyes flick away, but he’s already seen it. Just as he’s seen the black scrawl that was his signature just below the poster’s title. 

**_SAVAGE STARLIGHT, THE MOVIE._ **

_Starring : Kylo Ren and Amilyn Holdo as--_

Ben grimaces as he sits up from the recliner, arms lifting into the air to stretch with a succession of pops from his spine. He hefts a groan from the bottom of his gut, glancing toward the couch with the expectation of seeing Rey, but finding it only bearing a ratty blanket and throw pillow and an impression of a body instead of her in actuality. 

His gaze rolls around the living room, over to where it became the mixture dining area and kitchen. Sparsely furnished and devoid of color, the whole place seems fairly drab. He can’t see the girl.

“Rey?” He asks, dark eyes glittering, “You here?”

No response. 

Ben yawns and stands up, dull pain shooting through his joints and stabbing daggers into his muscle. He pauses in place, and then walks out toward the wall of posters. His hand extends, and he tears the SAVAGE STARLIGHT poster off the wall, before crumbling it and tossing it to the dirty floor. Again, his voice rises. “...Rey? You around here?”

And again, nothing. 

Ben frowns and goes to where his clothes are hung up, pulling his shirt down and dragging it over his head, followed by donning the pants and socks before he moves toward the bedroom. 

Nobody in there. It’s just the same kind of boring room as the rest of the tiny apartment sported. He grumbles and shuts the door, going to the front of the apartment this time to peek out into the hall. Again it was empty, but now, one of the doorways that had been boarded just hours before had been cleared, and the boards set against the far wall with an organized ease. 

Ben tries the handle and it opens. 

“Rey?”

This apartment was vastly different to the one they’d stayed in. It was covered in artwork and books, paint stained the carpet, easels stood here and there, as did pots of dead plants. He finds Rey curled up on a couch, looking through a book with a decorative blue sleeve, labeled: RUMI’S TALES FROM THE SILK ROAD. Her fingers tremble as she turns page after page… she doesn’t seem to notice him. At least, not until he clears his throat just loud enough to scare her out of her stupor. 

“Kiddo, you can’t just sneak off, alright?” Ben sighs, and glances to the cut-and-paste kitchen area that mirrored their previous apartment. “Let me know before you leave next time.”

“Sorry.”

Ben walks over to the kitchen and pulls the cabinets open, finding them empty. He continues to grumble. “Damn starvin’ artists… No food.”

“Starving artists?”

“Er… before cordyceps, there were lots’a people wanting to be artists, and, it didn’t really pay all that well most of the time. So… those people didn’t have extra money t’ stock up on food. Lot of them could barely pay the rent, let alone eat. So… the artists were starving. Get it?”

“Oh.” Rey closes her book and holds it tight to her chest. “Are we going to head out today?”

“Mm. I’m hurtin’ pretty bad right now so we’ll see about maybe heading out later. We should look through these apartments for some supplies in the meantime… what’cha got there?”

“It’s this… kid’s book, I think? Rumi’s tales. It has lots of stories in it.”

Ben grunts and shifts over to open another two cabinets, clicking his tongue in approval as he finds old cans and boxes of expired pastas. “You find anythin’ else in here you like?”

“Well…”

Rey pulls something square out of her backpack, and holds it up to show him. It’s an old sketchbook, and by the looks of it, it’s been well loved and heavily used over the years. Or, it had been well loved. Now, it’s coated in a thin layer of dust disturbed by her tiny fingerprints, labeled with a nothing name and a small design resembling a butterfly. “Whoever had this used to draw in it all the time.”

She opens the book and his brows lift. The very first page is a full-color rendering of a giraffe in the Serengeti, its lanky form posed in front of a large sunset and multiple herds of silhouetted zebra. 

“Huh,” Ben blinks at it. “Pretty good.”

“I know, right?”

She lowers the sketchbook and closes it again. Rey shoves both her book of tales and the sketchpad into her backpack, before zipping it up and slinging the pack over her shoulder once more. She stands, and stretches, and glances around at the different works lining the walls, “I wonder if the person who lived here is still alive. I hope so.”

“Maybe,” Ben muses. 

The two explore the apartment with little conversation between them, picking up bars of soap and old, preserved food, medical kits where they found them. And when they were satisfied, they headed back to their apartment, Rey dragging along one of the canvases with them to… ‘spruce up’ the space. 

Ben tends to his wounds, cleaning with peroxide he’d found and replacing the bandages until he was satisfied with them. A burning had started in the wound at his hip, deep heat in the flesh around it, but of course he wasn’t too concerned yet. It was no worse than the pain that was already present there. 

Rey busied herself on the couch, looking through the sketches and reading her book of tales. He found himself looking at her more than he would have liked. 

She’s interesting to look at while she’s distracted, her hazel eyes glimmery with imagination and a thumb popped unceremoniously into her mouth. She sucks on it like a child, chews the nail, and Ben can’t help but stare. Her hair is matted with sweat but it still hangs in almost sultry curls around her round face, emphasizing the spray of freckles on her nose and cheeks. 

His mind drifts back to the previous night, when he’d watched her fall asleep in her cute bra and panties, and an uncomfortable rush of blood hardens his loins. 

Ben quietly excuses himself to the bedroom, and closes the door behind himself. 

He sits on the lidded toilet of the bedroom’s private bathroom, eyes scrunching and hands dragging his belt open and his buttons free. Ben’s hand delves into his jeans and pulls out his cock, his fingers warming the flesh beyond its hot, erect state. 

“Fuck,” He breathes, leaning over to hock and spit on the pink tip, before dragging the moisture over himself. Ben stifles a groan into his shirt as he begins to stroke, working his flesh in a continued up-down while his mind ran with images of her young body. His body quivers as his imagination takes that view and runs with it, imagining what her skin might feel like against his, the pull of her sweet little mouth around his member, sucking away like it was her thumb. 

He squeezes upward toward the tip of his dick, and mutters another curse. 

He wants to pull that cute little bra off the Rey in his head and see her pert little tits. _He wants to suck one of her nipples into his mouth and feel her fingers in his hair and--_

“Mr. Solo?” Her voice travels through the wall. 

Ben can’t help but grunt, his brows furrowing. “Fuck… what’s up, kid?”

“Uh… Well… there’s something out here you should probably see--”

“Can it wait a minute?”

“No… not exactly.”  
  


 _God damn it._ He hisses softly and pushes his boner back into his underwear, tucking the shaft upward into the waistband so that it didn’t show through his jeans when finally he pulled them back on. Ben stalks back out into the main room, trying not to look too flushed, or too much like he’d just been masturbating to the thought of sucking on an underage teenager’s breasts. 

Rey is looking down through a slat in one of the window’s boards, staring at something concerning out on the street. “There are people out there.”

“What?”

She glances over at Ben and points at the crack. He investigates, and attempts to keep his cool at their proximity. Even after the exercise of yesterday and being in wet, moldering clothes, she smells good. 

Ben stares down through the narrow crack to the street, which has recently been filled with live cars… and multiple people clad in what looked to be riot gear. His blood chills. “Military. We gotta get the fuck outta here.”

“I thought you were hurting?”

“Not bad enough to sit here and get shot.” Ben sighs, “Get your shit. We’re leaving now.”

They make an exit out into the hall and cross it to the door opposite theirs. Ben pries off the boards, and slams the door open with his shoulder, before ushering the girl inside and glancing around the room at what they might be able to utilize as a rope. 

This apartment is festooned with doilies and pictures of family, and little decorations relating to how grandmas give the best kisses and whatnot. 

“Help me find some blankets,” He says, and hooks a thumb back toward the side which undoubtedly contained a bedroom. 

His unsatisfied erection complains in his jeans. Ben tries to ignore it as he drags a linen closet open and starts to tie together thin blankets and dishcloths and whatever else Rey brought him. And then he dragged the makeshift rope ensemble to one of the windows. This one wasn’t boarded, and he could see clearly out into the back street. No soldiers yet. 

Ben forces the pane and ties the rope to a table leg, before climbing out first. 

“C’mon. And be quiet.”

His lanky body slides quickly down the rope and to the ground, where he waits with his arms up, gesturing for her to follow him. She’s slower to shimmy her way toward the ground, thin arms gripping the rope with nervous, strengthless tension. The sinewy cordage of her arms tenses for one violent moment, and then she falls. 

Ben hardly has time to gasp before her weight is on him, dragging the both of them into the grass and mud with an unceremonious thump.

“Fuck--!”

Rey takes deep breaths and climbs off him, apologizing profusely beneath her breath. 

“What the fuck was that?”

“I don’t know. Sounded like someone yellin’.”

“Go check it out.”

Ben hisses another strand of curses before pulling himself to his feet, and grabbing Rey hard by the back of the neck to shove her forward. “Go. Go.”

They run with heads ducked through the undergrowth, managing to cross the street before the patrol combing the back of the apartment glanced their direction and shouted to the others. Flashbeams fall on their backs and Ben’s mind swims with panic; he grabs her hand viciously and veers left, heading right toward the Platte river. 

“Ben--!” She yells, “Ben, you shouldn’t-- your leg!”

“Shut the fuck up!”

Ben shoves Rey through a crack in the fence and scrambles after her, gunshots riveting the air and upturning the dirt just where his feet had been before. 

Without any instinct save for survival, he grabs Rey hard and pulls her to him, before vaulting their bodies into the river as one entity. 

The water hits his body like a train, cold and violent with current. He chokes for a few seconds beneath the surface for a moment, his muscles frozen to Rey, preventing either of them from reaching air. He gasps water and it burns, and in that second he realizes that he needs to get them, both of them, back to the surface. 

Ben kicks against the hard daggers of the eastward current and drags Rey’s body as high as he can manage it, allowing her to kick away and watching with admitted relief as white spray fanned over the surface and she broke out. 

Water seeps up his nose and into his mouth, crawling down his throat.

He finally reaches the surface with a gasp, and drags himself to the shore to roar vomit. His shoulders shake as he heaves, water shooting from his throat in bursts mixed with bile and chunks of his breakfast, and hard slicks of snot. Ben gasps at the air, his chest aching, his forehead pressed to the mud as tears slip free and join the mess on the ground. 

He finally sits up and lifts his head to the daylight, his soaked hair clinging to his forehead and shining coal black. 

“...Rey?” He croaks, looking around for her. Ben climbs slowly to his feet and grabs his pack out of a shoal of mud, slinging it over his sore shoulders and starting back in the direction they’d came. 

Rey washes up on a bank only a few yards away, her braid undone and dark hair hanging in tangles around a face twisted in misery. 

“Ben?”

“Fuck. Rey, you alright?”

“You’re an idiot,” She coughs, and a slimy spell of water shoots from her mouth and coats a rock. “Let’s get the fuck away from here before they come after us.”

“Good idea.”

The two of them exchange drowned glances and slowly stand, sopping clothes hanging off them in heavy bundles. Ben grumbles as he drags his shirt off, pale body gleaming with the luminescence of the moon reflecting sunlight. He wrings the fabric as they find the road again. 

His bandage had come away during the scramble in the water, and the angry pucker of his stitching leaks blood where it had torn. The wound gapes angrily, the meat of his abdomen pulsing and throbbing. 

“Ben--”

“It’s fine,” He mutters, “We can fix it later. Check it out--”

He points to a pair of bicycles leaned against a house, and she glances at him. 

“I don’t know how to ride. Do you?”

Ben’s eyes fall on her and his brows lift in a genuine expression of amazement and, almost a bit of concern. He nods his head firmly and reaches out to the bike, dragging it toward the house’s front door. “I’ll go in and see if I can find a pump for these tires. You… stay low. If those bastards come around again, don’t worry about me-- just hide.”

He surprises himself with that. Bastards. These were his brothers and sisters in arms and he’d just called them bastards. 

She nods feebly and he claps a hand over his wound, before jamming the door open and falling into a crouch. 

Immediately, he notes a clicker in the house. It rattles off in another room, clicking between gasps for breath and shrieks, feet scrabbling at the ground for purchase when it lunges forward and knocks something down. 

Ben takes a deep breath, and holds it, his lungs aching. He crawls on hands and knees toward the door to the garage, chest tightening immensely as the thing grows closer, and closer, and finally enters the same room as him. It rattles out a series of clicks and shrieks, measuring the room blindly, and finding nothing. Yet. 

The creature reeks of urine and spore, its mouth and hands smeared in dried blood, fungus growing up through its nasal cavity and splitting the upper teeth with a large gap. It was a man, and its squared shoulders quiver as it readies for another rendition of shrieking.

Ben can hardly take it. He’s scared of this thing, with its vile, skin-splitting flora and bioluminescent veins spreading through the fan-shaped fungal plates. 

He turns to the garage door and, quietly as he can, he unlocks the door and slips through it. And just as it closes, a louder sound, he can hear the thing begin to scream and pound on the door. 

“Fuck...fuck… okay.” He glances around the empty garage, and finds the tire pump leaned against a washer and dryer set that sport a layer of lichens. 

Ben grabs the pump and returns to the door, readying his knife as he reaches for the handle. 

As quick as he can manage, he yanks the door open and reaches for the clicker. It reaches back, moldering hands grabbing for his shoulders and getting a good grip, body rearing and lurching in an attempt to bite him. Ben slams his shiv into the back of the thing’s neck, and it goes limp. 

He gasps, not realizing he’d still been holding his breath, before tucking away the knife and the pump and hurrying outside again. 

Rey remains where she’d been told to be, and the two exchange a silent glance. 

“Are you--?”

“Don’t ask.”

He shoves the pump onto the front tire’s spigot and fills it, and then fills the back tire, his dark eyes shimmering with fearful tears. She doesn’t comment on them… something he’s thankful for. 

When he’s satisfied the tires are pumped enough to at least get them going for a while, he swings a leg over and bounces his weight on the vehicle. “Get on the handlebars.”

“What?”

“Handlebars. Now.”

“Fine. Sheesh.”

Rey climbs awkwardly onto the front of the bike and parks her ass on the handlebars, right between where his two meaty hands had the bike’s grips in a hard clench. Ben doesn’t wait for her to get settled, just pushes his weight on the pedals and coasts them at the speed of light down the hill, past a green sign indicating the right direction for Alcova. 

Ben’s hair flies back over his shoulders and away from his face. He stares hard over her shoulder, looking down the road to where it became a winding stretch past Red Butte. 

They ride the 220 for a while, bike eating up the furry road and passing the ancient remains of car wrecks. 

“You know, I can’t believe you never learned to ride a bike,” He scoffs. “What did that school teach you, anyhow?”

“Uh… you know, medical stuff. Sutures and, dealing with infections…”

“I’m gonna teach you to ride a damn bike when this is all done. No damn childhood--”

Rey leans back against him and he’s happy to have her warm, wet body against his bare chest. Ben smiles to himself, and rests his chin on her shoulder. She’s still as a statue on his handlebars. “What’s the fuss about it anyway? Did you ride a bike a lot as a kid?”

“Yeah.”

“You liked it?”

“Well… yeah. I liked it a whole lot.”

She takes her time pondering that, and Ben continues pedaling them along the highway. 

Herds of deer flow like water through the abandoned wrecks, traveling quickly along their routes to different grazing areas and various inlets with fruit trees and wild berry bushes clogged with birds and weeds. He stares at them all as they pass, amazed at just how much he’d forgotten. This was the world, the one he’d roamed freely in at one point. 

Amazing how he’d taken it for granted. Just this view was enough to make his mouth open and a sigh roll out. 

“It’s beautiful out here,” She whispers. “I’ve never been so far outside of Casper.”

Ben wants to promise that the rest of the world is just as beautiful, if not more so, but he doesn’t. He doesn’t want to disappoint her if those things end up not being true. And halfway into that realization, he wonders when it was that he’d started to care at all about her being disappointed or not. 

“Bessemer Bend’s comin’ up,” He says, “You wanna stop?”

“Yeah. I should fix your stitches.”

“Gotcha.”

He turns off onto a dirt road and continues to pedal, pinching his sides and not particularly caring at the moment how fucked up this journey here had been. 

“We’ll see about a farm for the night. They might have some food stored up.”

The property at the far end of Bessemer Bend’s first offshoot road was a friendly little hamlet settled on the bank of Matheson Creek, surrounded by empty cowpastures and a few scattered buildings that must have been stables, barns, and old ranchhand quarters. It wasn’t hard busting into the house, in fact it was almost laughably easy, and Rey had waited dutifully outside while Ben went first into the house and scoured each corner for infected.

When he hadn’t found any, he’d returned to the front porch, and gestured for her to come in. 

His side aches terribly as she stitches it, but it could be worse. The blood is slowing again, seeping sluggishly through her fingers and over the pink embroidery thread she used. 

And when she’s done, he falls onto the large puffy couch and sucks down a bottle of liquor while she explores the house, ghosts howling ominously against the windows. 


	5. Chapter 5

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Little bit of a short one this time. Sorry, buddies!!

“It’s fucking cold.”

“Yeah,” Ben muses, staring out the window at the trees lining the very edge of the property where land encroached on Matheson Creek. He rubs the flannel sleeves of the shirt he’d taken out of one of the closets, trying to warm his snowy skin to no avail. “I’ll go out and gather some wood, I s’pose. If you could keep looking around for some food in here, that would be real helpful.” His eyes fall on her, and warm with sudden fondness. 

Rey’s nose is rosy in the dim light of the candles, a shade that matches her long, polka-dotted pajama pants and the pink sweater she’d pulled over herself. Her hair is clean now, washed and combed and rebraided into the long rope that was characteristic to her appearance; only now there was a yard of ribbon braided into it, red and decorated in little daisy print. 

Ben pushes out into the twilight and grimaces at the rush of bitter wind attacking his skin. Even though he was clean and dry, the air here is almost as freezing as the North Platte River’s icy grip. Grumbling, he grabs a hatchet still embedded in a tree stump, rusted and caked with dust, before walking off in the direction of a grove with some smaller, non fruit bearing trees. 

He hacks a few of the saplings down, and gathers the larger sticks and fallen branches left beneath a huge poplar tree, the hand axe still effective if a bit more blunt than it had once been. 

Bundles of wood in his arms, Ben returned to the house and found Rey stretched beside the dark fireplace, her nose in that book she’d found. 

“What story are you on now?” He questions, “In your book, I mean.”

“The Roar in the Mirror.”

“Really? What’s that one about?”

Ben falls onto his knees and shoves logs into the fireplace, his eyes warming at a pile of old newspaper that she’d scrounged up for him to use. She was a thoughtful girl for sure, always a step ahead. 

Rey licks her lips, “I’ll read it to you, if you want.”

Ben’s brows lift, and he cocks his shoulders in a mild shrug. What was it supposed to matter to him if she read her little stories aloud? He wouldn’t admit that he’d really like it… that he wanted to rest his head in her lap and allow her to read, just like it had been with him and his mother when he was a boy. Ben had always needed extra comforting, extra attention. And without Leia, he had found himself… lacking. 

“We should get some chow goin’ first,” Ben drawls. “You find anything?”

“A cellar, I think.”

Rey jams an envelope into her book to keep her place and stands, thin body rising and gracefully beginning to move toward the kitchen. Ben hadn’t even lit the fire yet, and already he was feeling warmer.

“You think?”

“I can’t get the door open.”

Ben mouths out ‘ah’, and makes to follow her. His long legs eat up the floor quickly, and soon enough he’s on her heels, trailing to a small alcove with a latched door hidden behind a yellowed secondhand curtain. She points to the handle, and subsequent lock poised right above it. “It looks like it locks from the other side.”

He grunts and tries the handle anyway, “There a key around somewhere?”

“I found a few, but… none of them fit.”

“Gotcha.”

In a violent burst of motion, Ben slams his shoulder against the door. Once barely shakes it, twice does nothing, and three times hardly makes the hinges squeak. But Ben rams himself against it until the wood begins to protest, until suddenly a loud crash booms in his ears and suddenly he’s tumbling down through the dark, down a set of stairs, and landing on a hard floor. 

“Fuck!”

“Jesus christ, are you okay?” She calls down. 

Ben’s eyes search the dark, bleary, and lift to the stairwell to find Rey peering down through a man-shaped hole in the door. Hoarse with pain, “I’m fine… just… a fall.”

He wheezes lightly and stands up, bending to brush his knees off. 

Another strand of curses falls from his mouth. Ben glances around the cellar, his eyes slowly adjusting to the rank darkness. Cylindrical shapes register on things that look like shelves, and something else catches his attention… something still in the very corner of the room, breathing, raspy voice rattling with each suck and blow of air. 

Ben’s body stiffens. 

“Rey?” His voice lifts, “Can you get a candle for me?”

No response from the thing in the corner. He moves back up the stairs, and peers through the hole in the door at his young companion. “Or a… y’know, a flashlight, or something.”

They exchange glances through the door for a few seconds, and then Rey turns away, venturing back into the house for what seemed like an eternity before returning with a camp lantern. He nods in silent approval as he takes it. Ben descends the stairs again, flicking the lantern on and lifting it to the level of his head.

The cellar’s interior comes slowly into view: a few shelves along the far wall packed in cans and pickled goods, and then a tarp at the very end of the room, shifting as something, or someone, moved underneath it. Ben swallows as he nears it, his hand reaching down to pull the knife from his belt. 

Ben sets the lantern down just as he reaches the tarp, and with shaking hands, he readies his knife in a position to stab and yanks the plastic fabric away, revealing… a possum, that hisses and slinks back into its nest of a torn up couch, leaving Ben to gasp away the remainder of his adrenaline alone there in the dark. 

He finds his camp lantern again, trying to contain the ill flickering of his heart in his throat. 

The man gathers a few cans of veggies and stock broth, and returns to the upstairs rooms where Rey was waiting, trying not to show how shaken he was by the damn possum. 

“Find anything?” She inquires. 

“Uhh… yeah, lots’a shit down there. Right now I got… He glances at the cans in his hands, “Chicken broth, diced carrots, beans, and a thing of corn.”

“Nice.”

“Mhm. Grab a pot.”

By the fire, Ben loads a black saucepan with the contents of the cans, mixing them together with no clear goal in mind besides the ache in his stomach. And when he’s satisfied that they are thoroughly mixed, glopped together in a single mass, he covers the pan and shoves it into the fireplace to bake on the coals. 

“Do you want me to read to you now?”

Rey catches his attention again, his dark eyes meeting hers in the orange glow. Something unspoken passes between them, a silent yes, and Ben tries not to let his cheeks begin to turn rosy as she licks her lip and tears her eyes from his to glance down at her page. He notices that the collar of her sweater is scooped just slightly, offering a peek of bare amounts of cleavage. She doesn’t have a bra on… and her nipples poke through the pink fabric, as if to stare. Or to taunt him. 

“The Roar in the Mirror,” She starts. 

_“The Animals of a valley in the jungle were very troubled by a violent, arrogant, and destructive lion. He often killed other animals just for the sport of it. He had defeated all the other lions in the jungle, had no competition from anyone, and revelled in his strength and power… The animals-- the fox and deer, hare and jackal-- had no peace of mind, and lived in constant fear of the lion’s ambushes and senseless carnage.”_

_“He would carry off their young, eat one or two, and use the others as bait to attract other animals that he also killed and left lying around his lair, to show off his power and his unmatchable hunting skills. In their desperation, the animals decided to send a delegation to the lion and propose a compromise.”_

Ben leans closer, his face warming, eyes gleaming with fascination. Rey seems to notice it, because she gestures to her lap. Gladly, Ben rests his head on her thighs, and allows her fulsome scent to calm him. 

_“The Lion saw them coming…_ ” Her fingers brush through his hair, _“...and was about to swoop on them all when a little hare with perky ears, bright round eyes, and a dark nose spoke up in a surprisingly loud voice. It was his idea t bring the delegation to the lion. ‘Wait, king of beasts, wait! We have come to you with a proposal that will make you very comfortable and happy’.”_

God, he loves the way she sounds when she reads. Her voice rounds and brings life to the words, lifts and swells, changing for the voice of the rabbit and then deepening to accommodate that of the Lion.

_“...’I am very comfortable and very happy already,’ the Lion smirked, sharpening his claws on the bark of a tree.”_ Rey pauses for dramatic effect, _“But the rabbit, he said, ‘Our plan… will keep you well fed in your old age, sire.’_

_‘Old age?’ The lion smiled, contemplating his beautiful, healthy claws, sharp like sabers. ‘Who’s old?’_

_‘You’re not at all old, your majesty--” Rey pauses to take a breath, and swallow some of the discomfort of doing the voices, “--All around us is evidence of your youth and your vigor. I only meant that our solution will ensure that you will be provided for down the road, when you grow old and are incapable of hunting,’ The hare said with a deep bow._

_‘Grow old and incapable of hunting?’ the lion laughed with a growl. ‘Don’t fool yourselves. I will never grow old.’...”_

Rey continued into the story, her face animated, blossoming mouth making exaggerated motions for the sounds she was trying to convey. The nasal, small voice of the rabbit, the booming baritone of the lion, little pealing bells for each of the individual animals that led toward the end of the story, where the Hare convinces the rest that he’ll be able to take care of the Lion, and the rest are skeptical of his ability. 

The hare arrived late to his next meeting with the lion, and fabricated a lie detailing how another lion had eaten the sacrifice that the Hare was going to commit to the first, after claiming that he himself was the king of the jungle. . 

_“...’If you want your daily allowance, there is only one way, sire. Get rid of the other one. You can do it, your majesty. For you are strong and--’_

_‘Of course I can. Don’t tell me what I can do, you crumb!’ The lion lashed out, itching to tear the poor hare into shreds, but he controlled himself. He knew he needed the hare to lead him to the other lion. ‘Take me to this imposter!’ He spat._

_With the hare leading the way, they walked many miles to a well. As they approached the well, the hare fell back… as if afraid. And the lion began to get very infuriated. They had traveled a long way, and there was no other lion in sight.’...”_

Rey pauses again to breathe, her eyes leaving the book to look at Ben. She bites her lip, and stares, until the silence catches his attention and he glances up at her. Their eyes meet. 

Once again, Rey returns to reading.

“...The hare,” her voice lifts, uncertain, “Oh, fuck. I lost my place.”

Ben does the unthinkable, then: he laughs. The sound is a jolly, gutty, silly bubble of noise, and when it starts, she can’t help but start laughing herself. His eyes fill with mirth as they look up at her, and for the first time in many years, his gaze is not as cold and solid as a rock. 

“Find your place,” He insists. “It’s getting good.”

Rey rolls her eyes and lifts the book again, skimming from the top of a page until she finds her place again. She clears her throat. _“...’He lives in the well, your majesty,’ the hare said, quay….qu...”_

“Quavering,” Ben says.

“Right. **_Quavering_ ** _in fear. ‘This is his fortress, and he is holding my companion, your breakfast, captive in it.’_

_With the hare by his side, the lion walked to the well. And with a loud growl that resounded far and wide, he looked down inside. In the clear, circular mirror of the still waters of the well, he saw a lion roaring back a challenge to him, and beside him the rest of his meal-- a plump hare, staring back with frightened eyes._

_The lion shouted: ‘That hare is my meal, you son of a donkey!’ and when the lion in the well echoed his words, the lion, mad and blinded by rage, leaped into the well._

_As the lion made a big splash, and thrashed about in the water before drowning, the hare shouted to him: ‘The aggression that you see in others is your own nature reflected in them, o lion.”_

And with that, Rey closes the book and levels her calm, hazel eyes back down at Ben. They exchange a long look in the firelight, expressionless save for the slight pout to Ben’s full lips. Finally, he sits up, and clears his throat to fill the silence. “Food should be about warm, I think.”

They eat together without exchanging conversation, but on occasion their eyes meet, and they spend time staring at each other. Ben wants to reach into her head and pull out her brain, feed the grey matter into a computer to read the thoughts running through her mind. He can’t help but feel the dark slash of nerves… wondering if he shouldn’t have taken her offer to lay his head in her lap.

When he’s done eating he drags a mattress out of one of the spare bedrooms and settles down on it, trying not to seem like he notices as Rey’s weight depresses the bed beside him.

It’s around midnight when the fire dies out and darkness claims the house once again. Ben lies awake beside Rey’s thin form, facing her back. The soft round of her backside protrudes ever so slightly from the slimness of her legs, and, feeling a spark of bravery, he shifts until he’s got an arm around her, and her ass is pressed to him. Ben feels his loins stir at her warmth, the blood slowly beginning to fill his cock. 

“Rey?” He whispers. No response.

His arm around her tightens just slightly, and he shifts his hips to grind the small tent against her. She’s so warm in his arms, so small. His eyes close and he imagines her eyes, the soft, fleshy mound at her core. 

Ben curses softly and releases her when she mutters something vague beneath her breath. Instead, he rolls onto his back and pulls his member out, hand caressing the base of his shaft and dragging it upward. The free hand covers his own mouth, and he stifles the sounds he makes when he finally closes his eyes and starts vigorously jerking himself off. 

The grip of her cunt on his shaft, or rather, the thought of it while he squeezed his member tight, is enough to bring him to orgasm within a few minutes, his finish embellished with the curling of his toes and the soft, muffled **_Fuck, Rey---_ ** against his palm. 

Cum glazes his fingers, and he mindlessly wipes them off on the sheets, reveling for a while in post-orgasmic bliss and smell of his own pleasure mingling with her aroma in the air. 

He doesn’t sleep that night, nor does he find any sleep in the morning. Ben lays on his side and stares at her braid in the dark, a hand rested tentatively on her side. 

At dawn, he resigns himself to getting up and looking through the master closet for some clean clothes. The previous occupant of the house was a heavyset guy, and while the clothes didn’t exactly fit well, they were enough to protect his modesty and to keep his warm when he ventured out to sit on the porch and enjoy a cigarette. 

Stale tobacco burns in his mouth as he exhales, though he’s unable to tell what’s just his breath and what is actually smoke. In the cold, clouds pillow from his nose and mouth anyway. 

Snow blankets the yard and shrivels the leaves on the trees around the house. White stretches to the horizon, covering the rooftops, frosting the switchgrass and bushes jutting out of Matheson Creek’s dry banks. He scans the horizon and pauses his gaze on a barn maybe a quarter of a mile from the house’s front gates.

He wonders if Rey might like to take a walk over there to check the place out later. And then he realizes what he was thinking about and his mouth pulls taut, displeased.

This has grown… complex.


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Edit: changed the story name :0
> 
> Friendly reminder that I do have a tumblr!! I'm over at @bigfoot-pocky and I take requests. Message meeeee I need friends. :D

“Okay, just keep pedaling. A little bit faster. Rey. Faster. Girl-- You got potatoes in your ears? I said--”

Ben covers his mouth in a poor attempt to hide the sudden grin stretching over his features. He muffles snickers into his palm, cheeks and nose cherry red both from mirth and the cold while he goes to the pile of bike and clothes that was now Rey. He leans over the drainage ditch, a gloved hand taking her small arm by the bicep to drag her upright again, out of the snow and back onto her feet. “You okay?”

“Yeah.” She raspberries out a few strands of her dark hair, freckled nose wrinkling. “Are you sure I have to learn this? It doesn’t really seem all that important.”

“C’mon.” He goads. “Try again. Don’t be discouraged. You’re doin’ great.”

“Alright… fine.”

She picks the bike up out of the snow and sets it up on the road again, swinging one of her long, sinewy legs over it before parking her ass on the seat. Ben’s hands find her waist and he starts to walk, pushing her as he moves in silent encouragement to start pedaling again. “When I let go, you’re gonna have to go faster. It’s easier for you to keep your balance if you go fast.”

Rey casts a glance over her shoulder and smiles at him. His blood freezes for an instant. 

He speeds up, his palms pressing tight against her back. Ben breaks into a jog, “Alright. Go fast. I’m lettin’ go--”

“No, wait!”

His hands pull off of her waist and she goes sailing down the road, the bike moving with the fluidity of an experienced rider… at least for a few fleeting seconds. Rey starts to yell out something else when the bike trembles beneath her and she guns too hard on the handbrake, her body doing a ridiculous ragdoll flip over the handlebars and landing hard on the asphalt. The bike falls over with a clatter, and she groans. 

He jogs over to her, allowing his smile to show this time. “Nice tumble, kid. Your head alright?”

“Mhm,” She grumbles, and lifts her hands to show him the mangled ruins of her skinned palms. “But my hands ain’t so good.” A pause, “And don’t call me kid. I’m not a… a kid.”

“How old are you, anyway? Like,  _ twelve?” _

“Sixteen,” Rey mutters, unappreciative of the sarcasm “I’m turning seventeen in a week. Not that it matters.”

Ben leans down and picks her up again, his hands taking her wrists tenderly to keep them by his face. He inspects the scrapes, tsking softly, before giving her a rough pat on the meat of her palms. She winces, and he smiles, a paternal sense of good humor washing over him. “Alright, alright. I won’t make you go again. Let’s clean these hands and check out that barn over there instead.”

A quick return to the house allowed Rey to wash and wrap her hands before the two set out again. They walk out toward the barn, Ben lagging a bit so that Rey could keep up, practically in sync with one another. He can’t help but notice how close she is to him, how if he reached down he’d be able to take her hand and hold it. 

She seems to be on the same track of thought, because she grabs his hand without a word. 

The barn is a looming, grey giant against the electric blue of the sky, its ragged sides scarred by rot and plant growth. The large doors are propped open by stacks of molded bricks, and the inside is piled in snow where the recent storm had blown in. 

Rey grips his hand tight with her little fingers, dragging him into the structure without one single thought thrown toward safety. “Look--!”

She pulls free of him and jogs around the stables, whistling a happier tune as she inspects old pieces of tack on the wall, and rusted over horseshoes hammered into walls. Ben chuckles and lingers toward the front door. He wipes dust off one of the stall rails, “Place hasn’t been touched in a minute.”

“What were horses like?”

“What?”

“Horses. What were they like? Did you ever see one?”

“Uh… I lived in the suburbs mostly, but, yeah, I saw a couple.” Ben frowns, and lifts a hand to scratch mildly at his beard. “They’re pretty dumb. A fair used to come into town during the summer and they had these ponies they’d bring along for the kids to ride? And, well, the ponies were fat and looked like they wanted to die. A lot of them had their teeth pulled because they’d bit kids. Smelled… dusty, and… they were soft, in a weird way.”

“Why was it weird?”

“Uh… horse fur kinda feels like beard hair, you know?”

She grins, “You’re fucking with me, right?”

“Hand to god.”

Rey pulls a horseshoe off the wall and inspects it, “Why did they wear these?”

“It was like their shoes.”

“Well, yeah, but why? Didn’t they have those feet made out of the same stuff as fingernails?”

“Hooves. Yeah, they did. Uh… I think they had soft bits that could get hurt? Sorta like our feet, you know. So they’d put shoes on the horse so it wouldn’t hurt its feet or legs or whatever.”

“Oh.”

Rey peeks into a stall and tilts her head, before crouching down. Ben watches this, frowning, “What’s up?”

She doesn’t answer, that light in her eyes fading to a deep, somber amber in the dim interior light. Rey shakes her head, and reaches her hand toward Ben without looking at him. He walks over to her and peers into the stall, his nose wrinkling instantly at what he found there. A desiccated corpse mildews the hay and loose earth, bones jutting up from the dry, raw proteins of a mummified horse body laying supine against the back door. 

“Oh.”

She stares, and a sniffle betrays her. Ben leans down and grabs her by the arm, dragging her up and away from the opening of the stall. And then he closes the door.

“Don’t look at that,” He insists. “You… that ain’t good for a girl to be lookin’ at.”

Rey nods and wipes her eyes on her sleeve, before gesturing to a ladder leaned up on one of the loft beams. “We should look… uh.. Up there.”

“Not too confident in this old wood…”

Rey shakes her head at him and walks to the metal barring of the ladder, her hands gripping two rungs and dragging the rest of her body up. Ben just watches, blinking.

She disappears into the loft, and a scramble of something falling brings his senses to full alert. 

“Rey?”

“There’s… a cat up here.”

“A cat?”

Rey peers over the edge of the loft and waves her arm, gesturing for him to come up. He sighs, and nods as he pulls his body skyward, just enough to peek his eyes over the ledge and stare in amazement as a cat nuzzles against one of Rey’s slender legs. 

He also notes, with his face reddening, that he has a good view of her crotch from here.

Rey reaches tentatively down to touch the creature, but it shies away, letting out a mildly pissed-off yowl and then a hiss. 

She mutters an apology to the creature and then moves back toward Ben, each step closer putting her body more and more into his perverted view. 

In her too-tight jeans, the soft rounds of her thighs press together, and she sticks her ass out as she’s leaning over to attempt to pet the cat, drawing near yet again. This time, the cat presses its head into her palm and purrs. She smiles, “Oh, nice kitty. Good kitty.”

Ben’s mouth feels dry. 

He climbs back down and holds his side, grimacing at the bursts of pain that flicker through him at the return of his muscles to their original resting positions. Shame still burns in him for masturbating next to her, and now he feels that same desire coming to a boil in the deepest parts of him, craving her, wanting to sink deep into her body and remain there, feeding off her breasts and gleaning pleasure from her like a parasite. 

Rey comes down with the cat wrapped around her shoulders, a grin on her face. “I think she likes me.”

“Well, she can come with us.” He reaches out to pet the cat, and pauses with his hand midair when the creature flattens its ears back to its head and opens its mouth to yowl again. 

“I think she’s hungry,” Rey starts. She takes Ben’s hand out of the air and squeezes it. “We could see if there’s anything in the house for her.”

“Good plan.”

Her hand is so small and so warm, and for the walk back to the house, Ben can’t help but fantasize about having her fingers in his mouth, sucking on them until they were pruned with his spit and then guiding them into her so he could watch her fuck herself. 

His mouth runs over with saliva at the thought. 

In the light, the cat is a ragged calico, her belly distended from many broods and nipples protruding from beneath the white fur on her midsection. It has mismatched, grey-green freckled eyes, with pupils that shrink to slits at the touch of sun. 

“What are you gonna call her?” He asks, tonguing a cut in his lower lip thoughtfully. “Any ideas?”

“Mmm… Quilt?”

Ben snorts at that, and she scowls up at him. 

“I think it’s a good name. Quilts got all sorts of colors and stuff, and so does she.”

“Yeah, but why not, like, Patches or somethin’?”

“I like quilt better.”

He rolls his eyes and manages to cock his shoulders in a dismissive shrug. “Alright, Quilt it is. That’s… cute, I guess.”

Inside the house isn’t much warmer. Ice frosts the windows, and their breath comes in clouds as they enter through the front door, into the room where not a few hours ago, Ben had climaxed into his hand and moaned for her. A stack of wood by the fireplace calls Ben’s attention, and he detaches from her to start it up. 

He chuckles as she settles down on their mattress just behind him, and coos to the cat while she rummages around in her bag. 

Ben lights the fire, and whistles softly to himself that same tune he’d heard from Rey earlier. He feeds the fire without much thought, a smile coming to his face at the sound of that cat finally eating. 

Quilt, he muses to himself. _What a silly name._

The fire lit, and the cat fed, Ben settles down onto the mattress, on the side furthest from the fire to allow Rey to bask in some of the warmth. He yawns into his side of their little nest.

To his surprise, she presses against him, her little ass rubbing against the front of his pants and stirring the limb within. She yawns too. 

“What do you think happened to the horse?” She asks, scooting until her back is flush to his chest. Her flesh is cold through her clothes, and thoughtlessly he wraps himself around her. 

“I don’t know,” He admits. “Maybe it got too dehydrated?”

“How long does that take?”

Her girlish questions tug at his heart just slightly. 

Ben lays an arm over her and nuzzles his strong nose into the back of her neck. She smells deeply of exertion, mingled with the sweetness of skin. He exhales slow and hot against her malleable flesh, another yawn chasing his breath. 

Quilt leaps off the mattress and stretches her belly next to the fire. 

“I don’t know,” He admits. “Don’t really know much about… well, animals, really.”

“Well how long does it take for us?”

He frowns. Ben shifts to pull the comforter over their bodies to trap the heat, dark eyes greying with thought.

His mind should go to the training he’d had in FEDRA, but it doesn’t. It goes to his grandfather, Anakin, the stories his mother had told and the bare few photographs that had been in the album kept in the master bedroom’s closet. _Cancer_ , he remembers her saying, He was burned very badly, so he already wasn’t pretty, but….

He would have lived longer, if he hadn’t…

“It can be anywhere from a few days to a week,” He says, solemn. 

~~**_A THIN, DEFORMED MONSTER--_ ** ~~

“...Some people take longer than that, but it’s pretty rare.”

_ VSED. VOLUNTARY STOPPING OF EATING AND DRINKING. THAT’S WHY HE LOOKS SO SICK, BEN. _

She turns slightly so that their eyes meet. “Are you okay?”

He hadn’t realized it, but there had been a hitch to his voice, a crack. He swallows back the emotions that the memory brings and rests his head again, fingers dipping bravely beneath the hem of her sweater to play tenderly at her skin. 

“I’m cold,” He lies.

She turns to face him, and then all at once they’re weaved together, his arms around her, her slender limbs wrapped tightly around his body, small breasts squished to his chest and face in his neck. His dick reacts of its own volition, jumping at attention at the prompt movement. There’s no way she doesn’t feel it. He coughs, “Uh, sorry. It’s not, it’s not, you, or anythin’-- It’s natural. You know.”

“I know,” She says. Rey scoots closer anyway, rubbing him again by accident with her body. He sighs into her hair, allowing himself to feen and warm and fantasize for a while. 

She’s so soft. Rey would be so soft. And she’s not untouched, but she’d be innocent with him. A wilted flower that just needed nourishing, pruning, someone to care for it instead of ripping its petals off. He lifts a hand and pets her hair down. 

He could be the one to take care of her. He really could be. Ben was, admittedly, a novice when it came to gardening, but with the proper steps he was certain he could bring the glow back to this girl. Though of course… he was also a rather OLD gardener. 

She moves and her clothed cunt presses against his crotch. Heat pours off her, radiating over his semi and bringing him to full mast beside her. She’s wet. He can feel her juices seeping through the clothing between them, and it nearly causes him to groan outright. 

He shifts her in his arms and pauses, pulling back to look at her. Their eyes meet, and she nods, slow and bloodless, before he settles her back into place and starts to move his hips. His dick grinds hard against his boxers and denim, hardening up when her body responds and she starts to move too. 

Embarrassment heats his face. He’s so close already. Just the taboo nature of the action was getting him off, before they’d even started grinding. 

Rey grips his shirt by the back and stays still, save for her hips making that slow, rolling back-and-forth. He gasps into her hair, precum leaking from the bulbous head of his cock and soaking the tip of his tent. She’s so hot against him, so small, her body so perfect and ready and malleable next to him. 

He wants to take the clothes off. It would be better if they did. 

“Can we…?”

Without a word, she stops and peels her legs off him, before rolling back over to face the fire, leaving Ben in stunned, confused silence. 

* * *

He smokes three cigarettes on the porch that night, one after the other until he could no longer stand their stale flavor and vomited the contents of his stomach into the switchgrass and weeds that had once been called a front yard. Soul sickness, his mother had called it when he was a boy. Ben was always sick when he felt bad. Like his body was rejecting the bad feelings, trying to hock them up like a stomach flu or a glass of bad milk.

He vomits a lot that night. He can’t help the horrendous hate and disgust he feels for himself. It leaves his stomach hollow, and his mind unsatisfied, but it’s just a side effect. 

You puke because you feel bad, but he feels horrible. 

Ben ashes his latest cigarette into the parched remains of a dogbowl while he watches the last of his dinner steam on the layer of snow coating the ground. Rey hadn’t responded to him getting up from their mattress, just laid there like a broken doll, her eyes staring blindly off at nothing and Quilt nuzzling into her limp hand. 

His cock aches painfully, but he wills himself to ignore it. He’d crossed a line, and now look at what he’d done to her. 

_ “Voluntary stopping of eating and drinking,” Her red lips form around the words, sickeningly cheerful despite the subject matter. His mother wears too much makeup. She looks like a clown, with foundation that doesn’t match her neck, the red lipstick, the trashy blue drugstore eyeshadow dusted around her eyes.  _

_ She smells deeply of alcohol. Her hands, rimmed with pink fingernails and scabbed knuckles, stroke him slowly over the chest. She pets him, from his neck, down his chest, to the sensitive place in his tummy that tickled when she touched it.  _

_ “He was very sick,” She muses, “Cancer of the brain. We didn’t see him most of our lives because he was ill in other ways, but we saw him at the end. He asked for us, you know. Me and your uncle Luke.” _

_ “Was he nice?” _

_ “No,” Leia muses, flipping a page. “He wasn’t very nice.” _

_ “Oh.” _

_ “Here… this is what he looked like. Before.” She taps a photo of a man who looks young, some handsome guy with dirty blonde hair, pretty eyes, and a nice, big smile. He’s got a girl in his arms, and Leia taps on her next. “This was my mother. Your grandma.” _

_ “Grandma,” Ben echoes her. “I don’t remember.” _

_ “You wouldn’t. She died when I was very young.” _

_ Ben ponders that, his fat fingers tracing trails over the visage of his grandmother and grandfather as youths. He sees a lot of his mother in grandma, a little bit of her in grandpa too. Mostly, he sees Uncle Luke. Were he older, and had he not known about Leia and Luke being twins, he might have questioned her parentage just a little bit more.  _

_ But he was just a tender boy of five. And little boys don’t know anything.  _

_ “Can I see you?” He asks, slapping his hand excitedly on the album’s plastic pages. “Please, mama?” _

_ “Sure.” _

_ She turns the page with her heavy fingernails and a few newer pictures emerge. A girl, clearly his mother, riding on a bike. Then a slightly older version of her, and slightly older, until finally the pictures of her individually stop and in come the visages of her and his dad, Han.  _

_ Leia sighs. “Will you make me a promise, Benny?” _

_ “Yes, mama.” _

_ “Don’t you ever do what your father did, you hear me?” Her voice is firm, and her grip on him is warm steel, the cordage of her arms as strong and taut as woven cables. “Don’t you hurt girls like he did. I thought… I loved him an’ he didn’t love you and me. He left us. Us. Me and you, because he didn’t want to be a full time dad.” _

_ “I thought he was workin’.” _

_ Leia sighs and squishes her son tight to her chest.  _

_ “I got faith in you, Ben. You’re a good boy. I jus’ know you are.” _


	7. Chapter 7

The bike comes to a stop where the 220 forks into a smaller road with the same number and offshoot highway 487, a worn green sign pointing them in the direction of Alcova by remaining on the 220 and continuing southwest. A small community had sprung up along this exit, one that Ben couldn’t find a name to, but if he had to guess, he would have called: Dirt. 

The relative green of the north tapered off into flat badlands the further south they got, dunes and desert flora only broken apart by small mounds of snow. The land is grey here, and so are the plants. Still, on the far horizon Ben spots tufts of green traveling east to west. Maybe a river. 

Rey is silent and still as a statue as she sits on the handlebars. She might as well be a ghost. 

She hasn’t said a word since yesterday, her only responses being hums and blank stares when he’d tried to address her. Which Ben supposes is just fine for him… he’s been trying to convince himself that her endless barrage of questioning was still annoying, but… now he misses it. He longs for a stupid question he can’t answer. Something to chuckle at so that the both of them would feel okay and be okay with each other again. 

Ben pedals along the 220, his eyes to the road ahead. A colony of rats scatters as the bike pushes through a narrow gap in traffic, and then slowly comes to a stop again behind a rather large pileup. The loose, dried-out raisin of a woman lolls her head out of a rusted up old window, her eyesockets and teeth bleached and strands of hair still connected to chunks of flesh remaining of her scalp. He tries not to look at her, but it doesn’t matter. 

He’s seen, and she takes up residence in his mind along with the horse, and his grandfather, and the clicker he’d dispatched in Red Butte. 

“Fuck,” He mutters, “Alright. We’re not getting past this.”

No response. Typical.

“We should go around.”

Again, nothing.

Ben sighs and swings a leg off the bike, the rest of his body following. His hands remain on the bars while Rey gets off too, careful not to swing her backpack around wildly. Quilt pokes her head out anyway, of course, to glare at Ben and then the sun, before retreating back inside. 

He leans the bike against one of the cars and gestures to a break in traffic where they could reach the drainage ditch. Rey lags behind him. 

“Will you please talk to me?” He asks, voice coming quiet and sickeningly desperate when they reach the property fence. Ben turns to look at her, dark eyes large and wide with despair. “I’m sorry. I went too far, an’ I shouldn’t have. It ain’t gonna happen again, I swear it, just… please talk to me. I just wanna make sure you’re alright.”

“M’fine,” She mutters, “Relax. I’m… just tired.”

A tide of relief cools his nerves. 

“Okay,” He says, though he sounds uncertain. Ben steps on one of the lower wires to the fence and grabs hold of the top, dragging it open for Rey to crawl through. 

There are more corpses in the field. Big creatures with horns, smaller ones, even a few unidentified skeletons that look vaguely human, save for the calcified fungal growth plates that spore through their skulls and necks. Ben absorbs them all as he sees them, checking each species off like a game of morbid bingo in his mind. Clicker, clicker, Bull, Cow, Goat, Stalker, clicker--

“There’s a house over there,” She muses, “Look.”

Ben squints against the sunshine and catches the vague shadow of a farmhouse, or maybe a barn, on the far horizon. “I see it.”

“I need to find some things. Uh… personal things. Can we stop there before we go further?”

“Uh… yeah, sure.”

They walk for a while in silence, past dried, sunbaked cowpies and lumps of snow disturbed by the bare footprints of infected. That’s enough to set Ben on edge. 

“I’m sorry,” Ben says again to the back of Rey’s head. “I really am.”

She cocks a shoulder and finally casts her gaze directly back at him. Their eyes meet in the hazy daylight, and Rey stops firmly in her tracks. “I know. I just… I don’t feel like talking much right now, okay? It’s fine. I just wanna have some quiet time for a while. We can talk later, right?”

His breath catches in his throat, but he manages a nod. “Right.”

  
  


Ben chews idly on his lip as they walk, the house growing and growing until they’re so close that Ben feels he might be able to run and make it there in two seconds. It had once been a grey, prairie-style home. Sunflowers grow wild around the ruined front porch, wilting now. The cold is sucking their color away. 

“Hey, are you sure--”

Before he can even register it, he’s on the ground, gasping and holding the side of his head. Blood and hair come off in wet chunks on his palm. Frenzied, his eyes roll around in their sockets until they land on Rey again… who has joined him in the snow and the grass with her head down. They make eye contact, and she lifts a hand to gesture ‘SHH’. 

_ What the fuck was that? _

_ Some tourists heading over here. I got the big one. _

_ Big? Were they a man or a woman?  _

_ Man. Had long hair, though.  _

_ Nice. Thirty points. Where’s the other one? _

_ Hell if I know.  _

Ben hooks a thumb back toward the road, and grimaces in Rey’s direction. “Let’s get the hell out of--”

The ‘shh’ gesture comes again. Rey begins to crawl on her belly toward the house, and Ben can’t help but follow her. What’s he supposed to do, let her get herself killed?

“Rey--” He starts again, voice lifting into a stage whisper. “What the fuck are you doing?”

“I need something.” She hisses. “Just stay here. I’ve got this.”

“The hell you do. This is crazy.”

She continues forward through the grass and snow, scooting forward until she’s violently yanked back by Ben’s hand on her ankle. Blood pours from the graze on his scalp, hot and steaming in the cool air, offsetting the insistent irritation in his face as their gazes meet once again. 

Rey slams her boot back into Ben’s face without so much as a grunt, and he cries out as he lets her go and covers the swelling impression of a foot on his cheek. 

She’s out of his reach before he can try to grab her again, and Ben stares as the switchgrass parts like curtains and she slowly, but surely, disappears from his view. A curse falls from his fulled lips, and his back cracks in a succession of sickening pops while he drags himself along after her. 

Rey is unbearably fast, lithe body moving through the brush as easily as if it were water.

_ THE GIRL! I FOUND HER!  _

Blind worry and rage floods his system, deep and acrid as poison as it pumps through his veins. Ben speeds up. He willfully ignores the pain throbbing in his abdomen and in the side of his head, grabbing at clumps of grass and frozen dirt to pull himself forward before he launches up to wail a punch right into the side of a marauder’s head. He grabs the guy and drags him down into the long brush, to silence him with a quick twist of the arms and the subtle snap of a neck breaking. 

_ Where’d she go? _

_ I don’t know-- have you seen Fred? He was just here and now he’s gone! _

_ Fuckin’ tourists.  _

Ben pokes his head above the watery line where grass became sky, observing the rustle of two men and a woman trying to navigate the grass to find Rey. He creeps toward the woman first. It’s easy to sneak up on her, and she’s silenced with a quiet gasp and soft whoosh as he dragged her body down into the foliage and smothered her in his hand. 

**_Rey, have to find Rey._ ** His mind swims with indecision, and he peeks again to catch a brief glimpse of her at the side of the house, her body lifting and slipping out of his gaze again as she catclimbs into a window. 

Ben pats his pants for his knife and draws it out of a pocket while he gains up behind one of the men, and a flash of steel separates the moments where he’s hidden and the one where he’s in plain view, holding this guy from behind, keeping the blade pressed to the ingrown stubble of his fat throat. 

“How many of you are there?” He rasps, “And don’t lie, or I’ll know.”

“Ten,” The man gasps, “Ten. I swear to god.”

“Do you wanna make it out of this?”

“Yes! Yes. I’ll… I’ll do anything you want, just… just let me go.”

Ben presses the knife harder against the man’s throat, “You’re gonna yell that you see her, and take off runnin’. And you ain’t gonna come back here, or I’ll gut your sorry ass like a squirrel, you hear me?”

“I hear you.” Breathes the man in custody, “Let me go. I’ll do what you say. You can’t kill me, man, I got kids--”

Ben nicks his knife into the guy’s collar before he shoves the man off in the opposite direction of the house, waiting in silence for him to start running. He does. 

_ I saw her going this way! C’mon! _

A parade of men and women clad in hunting gear and worn sneakers thunder out of the house, whooping and hollering as they run after the guy Ben had threatened. He watches in satisfaction as they go, savoring his own taste of power for an endless moment before he finally turns to the house, and heads inside. 

Rey is standing at a broken mirror in one of the rooms, her hand clasping something that looks like a wadded up bandage steeped in blood. She stares at herself for a while, sniffling, seemingly unaware of Ben’s presence in the doorway. 

“Kiddo?”

No answer. Ben leans a little further into the room and takes in the scenery. It had belonged to a teenaged girl, much like Rey, with band posters and DAWN OF THE WOLF merchandise, stuffed animals that had been gutted for their cotton and girly pink sheets stained in muddy bootprints. 

She’s holding a sanitary pad, he realizes. But the blood on it is far too much to be a regular period. 

“Hey… Look, I’m sorry I bitched at you,” he tries, reaching for her. She flinches away from his hand, still silent. 

“We can have sex if you wanna,” She mumbles, folding up the pad and tossing it to one side. Rey pushes past him and heads out the front door. It’s as if nothing has happened. No running off, no infiltrating this place. There was no point to coming here. “You don’t have to be so nice to me. I know that’s what you want.”

He’s stunned. “I didn’t mean--”

“Yeah you did,” She mutters, “Unkar told me what you did to him because of me. But you’re just as bad as he is. Worse. Because you still think you’re better.”

“Rey--”

“I like you.” Rey’s eyes are full of fire as they meet his. She’s so beautiful in this light, even if the weariness on her face has aged her by a few years. She looks as though she’s about to cry, but she doesn’t. Rey jabs Ben in the stomach with her finger, “You don’t have to be nice. Because I know you aren’t nice. I like you anyway.”

“But…”

“First time I saw you?” She continues, “You shot my friend because she was infected. She hadn’t even turned yet, but she begged you to let her out of the city instead. And you **_SHOT_** her.”

He remembers the infected woman. She’d been a dark-haired beauty named Rose, no older than fourteen, but her eyes were bugged and pink and her lips were swollen with fever. She had begged. She’d even offered to suck him off if he would just let her go. But Ben had pumped her full of lead twice over and stomped her body just for the fun of it, kept going with the cruelty even after she was too far gone to feel it. And he’d smiled and laughed about it afterward. 

He even remembers pitching a tent when he’d shot her that first time.

Rey trembles, but she’s still angry. He can sense it. “I saw you. And you were mean then, just like you’re mean now. You’re not nice. You’re not sorry that you tried to fuck me. You don’t care about me.”

Ben takes a step back and clears his throat, expecting to be slapped or pushed or something. But nothing happens. She just stares at him with her big, angry hazel eyes, and spits at the ground, before turning and walking off toward the road. 

He just follows her. 

* * *

Dark eyes roll mildly over a sign worn through with bullet holes. Miles ranch had certainly seen better days, Quilt took to walking alongside them after they’d found the road again, but it had gotten to the better half of two hours just walking when finally they found civilization once more, and by then Quilt had already thrown in the towel and begged Rey to be in the backpack for a catnap. ( Pun intended )

  
  


Silence punctuates the soft racket of birds enjoying the very last of the sun as they make their way up the road, following the river in its endless snaking south to the reservoir. 

They decided not to stay anywhere for the night, but to keep going. According to his map, Alcova wasn’t that far away now, and it would make more sense to walk through the night and rest awhile in the morning. Of course, his body disagreed. 

His scalp aches around the red stripe in his head, blood and hair clumping around the wound like morbid garnish. Even the air against it is painful. 

They hadn’t spoken since the farmhouse blowout, but this time Ben was actually glad about it. He wasn’t interested in hearing more about what a monster he was, or how she liked him despite his flaws. Just thinking about the conversation bitters his mouth. But Rey had notably perked up since they’d started walking again… and in vain he hopes that maybe, just maybe, the yelling had been a side effect of some hormonal mood swing. 

Dark closes in on the road and they still walk. Birdsong dies, and leaves the pair with only the sounds of their bootsteps crunching on the ruined asphalt… and a soft humming that must be coming from the girl. 

“Rey?” He tries. He can't help himself.

“Yeah?”

“Can we talk about earlier? It’s… just botherin’ me a lot.”

“What’s there to talk about?” She responds. “I told you the truth.”

“Not about that.”

Ben’s mind races back to the bloodied piece of cloth in her hands when he’d first discovered her in the house, and he muses over it while his mouth moves of its own accord. “Are you on your period?”

“No.”

“Oh.”

She stops, and he nearly runs into her. 

Rey turns toward him, and reaches to take his hand. It’s too dark to tell, but he’s certain she’s crying, or about to cry. Something close to it. 

“Why was there all that blood then?” He asks, “You were holdin’ somethin’.”

She sighs. 

“You wanna know why the fireflies wanted me to leave?” She asks, drawing near to him so that she doesn’t have to raise her voice. He feeds on her radiant warmth as she comes close, wants to drag her into his arms and just hold her there. Her eyes are wide in the dim moonlight. “I’m pregnant. Was. Unkar… he… you know what he used to do.”

“I’m sorry,” Ben starts, blinking. “I didn’t--”

“Don’t be sorry.”

She doesn’t have to say that terrible word, because he knows already what it is. Not a period, blood all over, **_was_ ** pregnant. 

“I’m happy about it,” Rey whispers. Her arms lift to wrap around his neck and on instinct, he lifts her. Her legs circle his middle. Before he even thinks to respond to her, her lips are pressed hard against his, and he’s moaning into her mouth. 

They kiss hard, and keep kissing, until the world itself melts to nothing around them.

_What the fuck._


	8. Chapter 8

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Apologies for the long wait!! I'm going to try to update more regularly. 
> 
> Thanks for sticking with me if you've been reading so far.

The sun breaks like an egg over Alcova, a big orange yolk sliding through the silvery morning light and into the lower eastern sky. It parts a cotton field of fluffy clouds and pours gold light on the land, and onto Ben’s face as he pauses, and takes a deep breath. It’s fresh, the smell of the water from the reservoir carrying on the cold wind to his prominent nose. And he can smell her, her sweat, her skin, permeating the air of the car while she naps in the backseat. She needs a shower, but he doesn’t mind this. A little body odor is normal. 

It was a temporary stop. A good one, in Ben’s opinion. He’d offered to watch first so that she could rest, but now he was regretting it. The sun in his eyes, so pale and bright on the horizon, is only another reminder of how bone tired he is. Ben stares through the dirty windshield, across the street to where an old baptist church looms like a figure of immense judgement. Jesus is depicted in poorly done graffiti across the front face of the building, and his dark features-- properly arabic, he noted, with a small gleam of amusement and pleasure --are intense and strange. 

How long had she been sleeping? It must have been an hour at least, maybe two. He tended to lose time these days. No more drills, no more alarms and morning bitchfests with Hux, or squabbling over Oatmeal about how he’s too dedicated to his job. The orange sun reminds him of his old friend, and for a moment he swears he can see the copper flash of Hux’s curly red hair, darting across the street in front of him. A blink and it’s gone. Ben’s heart sinks into his guts. 

Ben reaches over to the passenger side and grabs Rey’s backpack, ignoring the protesting yowl from Quilt, who had been nested on top of it. Without thought, he unzips it, and digs inside. His hand comes into contact with clothes, a toothbrush, something smooth and oblong, a closed knife perhaps, and then the item he’d been looking for: the book. He slides the novella out of its place and thumbs a page open, returning to Rumi’s tales once again… remembering the story of the lion and the rabbit. 

His eyes skate over the story again, softening on the point where the rabbit draws the lion to the well. Is that what had happened to him? Had he succumbed to hubris and attacked his own reflection? 

It seemed so clear now, that he should run into a firefight and face himself there. He’d seen the sins of FEDRA clearly just the same as he’d seen those of the Fireflies. What was the difference between them, really? Bands of scared survivors in this lost world, burning down buildings, bombing, shooting innocents, shooting enemies. Both organized and led under people that had been barred and trained for war. Both cruel, unfeeling entities that didn’t care for their own supposed agenda anymore. 

The people of this world are thirsty for blood. He’s the same. 

The truth is, one organization is no different from the other. He’s certain that FEDRA would have turned a blind eye to the rape just the same as the Fireflies did, or shut her up some other way. And in his chest, a fractal of ice begins to shard for the organization that had been his bedrock. What would they have done? Heaven knew Rey wouldn’t have been the first. Or the last. 

Hush money in ration cards, leave from work duty, notoriety for being a bigmouth.  _ Shut up. Keep your nose down, they feed you. You were asking for it. He deserved what he took.  _

Hate grows in him, crystalline, sharp as a dagger and as toxic as straight bleach. 

“Ben?”

It dies like a flame snuffed under a brass bell. 

Ben turns around and casts his gaze on the girl in the backseat, expression warming as if to wish her a silent ‘good morning’. He extends a hand backward to cup her chin, and rub away some of the dust that had collected on her cheek from resting on that dirty seat for far too long. Tenderly, fatherly, “Yeah?”

“How long was I out?”

“Mm. Long enough. We should get movin’ before everythin’ gets too bright. I’m lookin’ forward to a long nap myself.”

“Right,” She breathes, squeezing her small body into that jacket, that jacket that had never fit her, that bunched around her arms and somehow made her look that much smaller. “Home stretch. Let’s find them.”

A cigarette bounces on his lip while they walk the length of Sherman street down to where it became Kortes. He let Rey lead the way this time, trailing behind while he smoked and watched Quilt stare lazily at the world passing by. The seat of Rey’s pants are ruddy with blood, something clearly related to the failure of her pregnancy, though he admittedly isn’t sure how.

She must not know, because she doesn’t seem self conscious about it. She isn’t covering or asking to stop and change. Ben doesn’t know how to broach the subject, so he doesn’t. 

The roadsigns, while few and far between, seem promising. Firefly graffiti litters every conceivable thing in the area, and notably increases the closer they get to the bridge across the feeding river to the reservoir. At the mouth of the bridge, on what had once been a speed limit sign, is a gold arrow, pointing onward. It’s unspoken, but Ben knows that Rey knows where they’re going too. 

The school across the river is betrayed by a worn jungle gym, and is surrounded in armored vehicles. Charred piles of corpses bake in the sun within the yard, not all of them infected.

“You think they’re still here?”

“Not sure. Piles look pretty dead.”

Ben speeds up and takes hold of Rey’s hand. They squeeze each other, eyes mutually scanning the road ahead for danger. As they draw closer to the school, and finally step off the concrete bridge and into the brown sea of grass surrounding the building, the answer is clear to him. Obscured by the tall growth, propped against one of the trucks, is the mottled, decayed body of a stocky man clad in plainclothes. He wears a firefly armband.

Rey lets go of his hand, “Oh, god--”

Ben stares at the corpse, frowning. There’s something familiar about it, something he can see but can’t identify. 

“Ben?”

“Yeah?” He responds, unable to keep his eyes off it. “What’s up?”

Rey yanks on his sleeve until she’s finally caught his attention, and then directs his eyes to the electric plant just opposite the school. It takes him a minute to divine what he sees. Tangled in a mess of wires and dried viscera, a body hangs from one of the pylons, arms spread in the traditional armspan of a crucified Jesus. His guts were pulled out of his belly, draped over the steel vines and ending in a few strands of cut rope just above where an average height person would be able to reach.

The both of them stare, and stare, and stare some more, until finally Ben’s trance lifts, and he ushers Rey away from the gruesome scene with a tired, “Don’t look at that.”

A war happened here. One needed only to see the crucified man, but it was clear in the bullet holes littering the cars, the sprays of blood on the ground and multiple bodies picked clean save for the meat in their clothes. 

He looks back at the firefly. 

_ “You know, you never told me what you wanted for your birthday, Ben,” jokes a blonde man sitting in a pleasant state of half-intoxicated stupor. He smells deeply of rum, and it’s a smell that Ben remembers fondly, the smell of his father whenever Han decided to pop in and visit. Uncle Luke grins, his cheeks pink and swollen at the apples with pure, unadulterated pride. “I had to get you something.” _

_ Ben smiles good-naturedly, “No, you really didn’t. I’m just happy to see you guys… besides, my apartment doesn’t have enough room for those crazy knick-knacks you like so much.” _

_ “Why don’t you move into a bigger place? That acting job did real good for you, didn’t it?” _

_ “Yeah,” He chuckles, embarrassed. Ben rubs the back of his neck. “I have some money put away. I just don’t see the point in getting all crazy with my living situation, you know? I’m one guy. I don’t need a whole mansion to myself.” _

_ “Well, maybe not a mansion, but…” Luke grins, “Surely a three-bedroom so I got a place to stay when I visit you.” _

_ “In your dreams, old man.” _

_ Luke bellows out a guttural laugh, and Ben can’t help but laugh right back. His uncle’s laugh is a good one, a strong sound, a funny sound. One of the laughs that makes everyone around start laughing too. Luke rests in his leather recliner, looking positively jolly in his tacky orange sweater and workman’s jeans, one of his large hands curled around a thick glass of rum and coke. It shakes as he guffaws.  _

_ When finally the laughing subsides, Luke digs in his pocket for a small rectangle, and tosses it to Ben. “Here’s what you get for not makin’ a list or anythin’.” _

_ He catches it in the air and immediately gives the thing a shake. “What is it?” _

_ “A dildo,” Luke snickers. “Open it.” _

_ Ben peels the top off the small box and stares down into it, blinking at what appeared to be just a normal, black fountain pen.  _

_ “Now before you get disappointed,” His uncle continues, “Take it out an’ let me show you how to use it.” _

_ Ben reaches out with the pen grasped between two fingers, and his uncle takes it gingerly from him. Casually, Luke leans back in his chair and fiddles with the thing for a moment, before his lips part and he calls out, “Hey, Leia! Come here a second!” _

_ “What?” _

_ “Just get in here. I have something to show you!” _

_ “Han is here. Can it wait? I’m in the middle of something.” _

_ “Fine,” Luke grunts, “Tell Han to get in here. I’ll show him instead.” _

_ A conspiratorial wink to his nephew, and Luke hides the pen in his fingers while the slim form of Ben’s father takes up the doorway to the kitchen. Han is about to ask what’s so damn important when a blue light shoots out from between Luke’s fingers, and shines directly into Han’s eyes.  _

_ Ben can’t help but snicker at least a little bit at his father’s expense.  _

“Ben?”

Ben hardly noticed that he’d zoned out again, he was too busy standing over the body, inspecting its bloated face while he came to the realization that this firefly was, in fact, familiar. 

__

Luke’s face is swollen with bloat, and his eyes are closed, but it’s still unmistakably him. Ben falls to his knees next to the corpse, staring at it, studying the blonde locks spilling out of his knit beanie, examining the frost on his eyelashes. Ben stares, and stares, he doesn’t know what to do besides just… stare. 

And then he’s crying.

“Fuck--” He gasps, lifting a hand to wipe his watering eyes. “Fuck… Uncle Luke, I’m… I’m sorry.”

The corpse doesn’t respond. 

Ben scrunches his eyes closed and leans until his forehead is rested against the dead man’s chest. Luke stinks terribly, and he’s mottled in the sense of a bad watercolor painting, but he’s still Luke. And Ben still aches. 

Something crinkles against his forehead, but he can’t pay attention to that. He weeps violently, realization crashing over him in successive waves. Luke had been alive for close to twenty four years, and Ben had assumed he was dead. Luke hadn’t been that far away when he died. And it hadn’t been that long since he died, either. Maybe if he’d been quicker, if he hadn’t lagged so much on the way here… maybe he could have seen his uncle alive again.

Maybe. 

Ben leans back and wipes the snot bubbling out of his nose with his sleeve, unable to process the world around him, or Rey uncovering what had been crinkling on Uncle Luke’s chest. 

“To whom it may concern,” She starts, voice lifting over his sobs. 

_ We held out here as long as we could, but they followed us. FEDRA is here. The military came through and shot everyone to hell… me included.  _

_ I think this is the end. Can’t really feel my feet no more.  _

_ If anyone finds this… please deliver it to my sister, Leia, in Jackson. She deserves to know the truth. Please tell her that I didn’t mean what I said. I love her. And if Ben is there... let him know I love him too. Tell him I'm sorry.  _

_ God bless. _

_ Luke _


	9. Chapter 9

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> probably gonna be wrapping this story up soon!!
> 
> changed my handle here and on tumblr. I'm over at rowaniiismss now!! talk tuh meh

Gloved hands link together as the road turns to dirt. 

Ben puffs out steam, and watches it dissolve into frost before his eyes. Tufts of mist roll in pillowy clouds around the break in the forest where trees became towering walls. He stares at the fortress, holding Rey’s hand tight in his own, unsure of what to do besides look back at her, and meet those hazel eyes he likes so much. 

It’s surreal, being on the cusp of safety, so close and yet feeling so far. On this ridge above the town, he spots a parade of horses thundering back toward the main gate, ridden by men and women that don’t look much older than Rey is. With a mild sadness, he wonders if they too had been born after the world fell, if the oldest… himself, his apparently alive mother, his father, would be the ones that had to remember modern life on their own. 

Rey squeezes his hand, “You think they’ll let us in?”

“I don’t know.” 

The forest creaks around their heads, shedding needles with a gust of wind off the cold front coming up from the south. Ben pulls his hood up over his dark locks and then looks to Rey, before doing the same for her. His voice deep and rough with the cold, he mumbles, “I think it’s gonna snow again. You got your warm socks on?”

“Yeah, _dad.”_ Rey grumbles, “I got them.”

“Don’t call me that.” Ben can’t help himself, his crooked teeth show in a wide grin, and he laughs good-naturedly at her irritation. “That’s creepy.”

They backtrack through the woods, returning to a road the color of ink. It forks here, off to the dirt path overlooking the town, and then down the hill… presumably to the front gate. Ben guides her over the asphalt, her warmth penetrating the thick layer of ice that had formed on his skin. As they go, they pass small heaps of snow… some of which have been shaped to look like facsimilies of snowmen. Poorly formed. Child’s creations. 

The road is still somewhat even despite over two decades of wear; it feels good under his boots, solid, retaining the heat of the pale sun as it crested noon over their heads. Ben pulls Rey to his side, crushing her small body against his while they’re walking.

They reach the gate and stand before its large wood apex without a single word, eyed by two armed guards at either side of the giant doors. Ben looks to one on the right, an older black man with long dreads, still handsome even despite the years of wear on his face that stares Ben down. His mouth opens, “Can we help you, sir?”

“Yeah. Uh… C’n we talk to whoever is in charge around this place? I’m, uh.. I’m lookin’ for someone.”

“Hm. Alright.”

The man unpins a radio from his belt and lifts it to his face, “Maria, we got two more, come in from the east. Sorta looks like…” He pauses, and studies Ben a second longer, “...Just come and see. I’ll walk them in.”

The radio is replaced on his belt, and the Black man, who identifies himself as Anthony, pounds twice on the door behind him before it opens. Anthony cocks his head toward the interior of the town, it looks like maybe a few blocks of just walled neighborhood, before gesturing for Rey and Ben to follow him inside. 

Rey tucks tighter to Ben’s side, and he replaces his hand on the subtle curve of her hip. He’s assaulted with the musty, warm smell of horse and hay as they enter the fort, held suspended in the air like a stagnant snow of dust. Ben takes a deep inhale as a large, fat mare trots past him, extending a hand to run over her haunch while she passed. 

They were dragged before a fire barrel and left with an armed woman. 

Near to completely alone with the horses and her, Ben takes Rey up in his arms and ducks his head to kiss her. Their lips meet, the plush softness of his mouth against hers creating a hot, delicious seal. He delves his tongue past her lips and she meets it, moaning. 

After what felt like forever trapped in embrace together, they pull apart and find another woman, blonde, round eyes staring at them. 

“Well, you two don’t look harmful,” She muses. “What’re your names?”

“Rey,” He starts, gesturing to the girl in his arms, “uh, and I’m--”

The blonde, who Ben could only assume was Maria, lifts a hand to silence him. “You’re Leia and Han’s kid, right? You’re a dead ringer for your father. _._ ”

“...Yeah. I’m… Ben.”

“Well... _Ben_ , welcome to Jackson.” He gaze falls to Rey, who seems to shrink in response. “You too, Rey. Are you hungry? You’re thin as can be.”

“Er… No. But, thanks anyway. Can we meet Ben’s mom’n dad?”

“Sure. Right this way.”

* * *

  
  


Leia Organa is old as sin, now. Her dark hair is blotched with silver where it hasn’t fallen out, and she’s lost enough weight that she looks nearly skeletal. She lives in a small place at the end of a block close to the north wall, capping off the round of a cul de sac in a stack of broken glass and rotted board that looks as though it might collapse apart at any minute. 

Her wheelchair squeaks as Han pushes her out to the curb, and she gasps softly at the sight of her son, tall and dark, broody, with a girl on his arm. 

“Ben,” She rasps, extending a hand. Excitement blooms in her face, happiness. He just stares at her desiccated limb while it hangs in the air. 

“Uncle Luke is dead,” He mumbles. “Left a letter behind. For you.”

The light in her gaze dies just as quick as it had been born. 

Ben pulls Rey tighter to him, body tensing to a stone’s hardness. “Mom, I--”

She shakes her head, not willing to hear him. Her mouth pulls taut, “I left you a long time ago. It was wrong of me, I know, but… please understand my decision. It… it wasn’t to hurt you. I couldn’t stay, knowing you were FEDRA… I believed in the fireflies.”

“Terrorists,” He corrects her, staring.

“They’re working to help us, Ben--”

“They’re just like FEDRA,” He mutters, dark eyes burning, “Selfish. They’re glorified murderers, mom. Neither of them are good. Neither of them ‘want the best for us’, you know. I’ve seen it.”

“You don’t--”

“This is Rey. She’s… former firefly. I met her after I was wrongly accused of blowing up a stockpile, she’s… she’s only a girl. She was kicked from the fireflies for being raped and impregnated. Don’t you see?” Ben’s eyes glisten. “Neither of them care, mom. They’re evil.”

Leia pauses, and then looks down at where her hands are folded in her lap. 

“I don’t know what to say. I’m…"

She sighs.

_"I'm so sorry."_


	10. Chapter 10

Flurries of white roll on the breeze, blowing in speckles like confetti stirred by a fan. In dips and twirls, slashes of paint as animated as Van Gogh’s starry night, snow blows down from grey clouds and smears against the window as Ben stares out, his black eyes unblinking. Cold sweat slicks the back of his neck and chills when the occasional draft shifts the boards in the house. A thump here or there sets Ben’s teeth on edge; even though he knows he’s safe he can’t shake the desperate feeling of imminent danger. 

After the fourth thunk of snow clods hitting the roof, Ben departs from his cold room and makes his way down the hall to Rey’s. He manages to push her door open without turning the knob, the hinge giving a protesting little squeak as it swings ajar. She’s in a position that had mimed his own from earlier: sat up, a blanket pulled around her thin shoulders, facing the window. Ben announces himself with an embarrassingly fake cough. 

Rey doesn’t turn to greet him, but one of her hands lifts, pivoting back and forth in a gesture that meant ‘come here’. 

Ben crawls onto her bed and shunts himself underneath her blanket, craving the warmth radiating off her lithe form. His face nuzzles into the curve of her thin hip, and his arms wind around her waist. He could crush her if he squeezed just hard enough, and that very thought made him go soft at the center. Tender as though holding a butterfly, he sits up and pulls the girl into his lap, craving her warm weight on top of him. 

The lights of the surrounding homes penetrate the foggy flurries of snow and creep mildly, softly, through the window she now stared through. Ben pulls a few stray locks of her hair aside and then leans down to press his lips to the back of her neck. She hums in response, before her shrill voice lifts to pierce the air. “Can you undo my braid? It’s hurting me.”

“Sure.”

Ben leans back and digs the band off the end of her braid, freeing up three twisted sections of hair to fall, still tangled together, against her skin. He removes the one at her skull as well, and pulls his fingers through the tawny rope, loosening it. Slowly, the braid becomes unplaited in his hands, soft, greasy. 

“Maria gave me some soap, baby,” He mumbles, “Let’s put you in the bath.”

“That sounds real nice.”

Ben scoops the girl into his thickly muscled arms, and she goes limp. He cradles her, pulling her slender body against his chest as he walks the few feet from her door to the small bathroom they’d been allotted in their new little home. 

He sets her down on the shag bathmat while he leans to configure the drip system, twisting knobs and shifting pipes until a steaming stream of water pours from the faucet and pools into the tub. He runs his hand under the drip faucet, turning over the small bar of mildly scented tallow soap in his fingers. Bubbles start to form a foam on the upward face of the water, rising to about halfway up the tub’s wall before he turns to Rey. Gently, he unbuttons her flannel shirt and exposes her chest, her small breasts bare and nipples hard against the chilly air. 

She quivers when he strips her soft, wintery flannel pants off as well, hands falling to cover her panties. Rey’s eyes are wide, childlike. “Can I keep these on, please?”

“Yeah,” He replies, “Legs, now.”

Rey steps out of her pants and watches as he folds them up and sets them aside, before gesturing for her to get into the tub, cute underwear and all. She dips a single, dirt-blackened foot in, before sighing at the warmth of the water. She sinks, white panties turning a nude peach where it clung to her crotch. 

“Is the water good?” He questions, “Too hot? Too cold?”

“It’s good.”

Silence falls over the small room again, floral soaps scenting the air while Rey sunk into her modest little bubble bath, and Ben squeezed some home made shampoo into his hand. He runs the slimy mixture between his thumb and the hollow of his palm. After she wets her hair, he applies it to her head, scrubbing her scalp tenderly. 

She’s got a greasy head, but he doesn’t mind. He washes the grime away with a tenderness unmatched, and when he’s satisfied that her head is clean, he picks up a cloth to start wiping her face. “You’re thinkin’ about something, I can tell.”

“It’s just… I’m waiting for this place to be ruined, you know?”

“Huh?”

She sighs, “You remember that apartment we stopped in right outside Casper? The one next to that artist’s place?”

“I remember.”

“I dropped the sketchbook when we were running from FEDRA.” Rey leans into his hand, allowing him to explore her slick body while she muddled in her own thoughts. “Do you remember all those nice pictures? They’re probably ruined. It’s rained there by now for sure. All those pretty drawings aren’t gonna be enjoyed by anyone ever again.”

“Oh.”

Rey’s vibrant eyes lift to run over his face, and then she leans up, nearly close enough to kiss him. “This place is too good to be true. I’m... waiting to drop the sketchbook.”

“You ain’t gonna.”

Ben presses his mouth to hers, and the two loose simultaneous moans, before two wet hands press to the sides of his long face, and then thread into his hair. He kisses her hard, lips firm and pushing hers apart, tongue flicking out to meet hers in the sweet concavity of her mouth. She tastes of chewing gum, of the candy bar he’d watched her eat an hour ago. 

Rey’s lithe body is on him in moments, with a splash and a thud, soaking his clothes through with warm water and suds that smell of the tallow soap. 

“Baby,” He gasps against her mouth, “Oh, fuck--”

“Please don’t let this be ruined,” She whispers, “I want something to stay good.”

Ben’s large hands take fistfuls of her skinny hips, dragging her thin body until her hot, pulsing mound is positioned over the bulge in his shorts. She grinds this time, splaying her hands on his chest and throwing her wet head of hair back. Rey rocks her hips back and forth, chafing them both, fabric rolling between their flesh. 

Fireworks start in his crotch, buzzing.

Ben’s eyes roll back in his head, though somehow he can still see her, her small, heaving breasts as the nipples hardened and she lifted a small hand to pinch and twist at them. 

Their moans fill the bathroom, echoing with the dripping of the faucet. Ben urges her hand down, to free his cock and allow her clothed cunt to slide against it. 

Slipping into her is like sinking into fine oil, and as soon as he’s buried inside her throbbing pussy he’s a writhing, groaning mess. Ben jerks his hips up, ramming his impressive length into her, ramming the bulbous head of his cock against her small cervix. She grips his member as though afraid to let go of him, sucking him deeper and deeper until he’s buried to the hilt. 

Rey rides him on the floor of the bathroom, her small breasts bouncing, breath showing in clouds while the room chilled and finally dimmed, the single candle lighting it going out. 

She cums before he does, her walls clenching him tight as a vice mere seconds before he paints her insides white, and then he puts her back in the bath, without the panties this time. 

Ben finishes washing the girl without much fuss, watching with exhausted satisfaction while she breathed hard and wiped sweat from her forehead and soft beads of cloudy liquid from the tips of her pert little nipples. 

The water is cold by the time he finally takes her out and wraps her up in a blanket. It’s fine enough with him to just leave it there, let it stew till the morning when he’d run it back through the filter. 

He carries Rey back to his room and settles her down in his bed, content to crawl on top of her and warm her nude form with his body. Her fingers find his hip and run over the scar that had started to crust over the sewn-up wound, tracing each mark and jerk where it had ripped, been sewn together again, and healed.

“Baby?” He mumbles. 

“Yeah?”

“I think… I think we’re gonna be okay here.”

She stares at the ceiling, unable to refrain from squeezing him tighter. 

“I hope so, Ben. I really do.”


End file.
